Much of John Rawls' later work is concerned with the appli cation of his philosophical conceptions to the reality of liberal-democratic polities. I suggest that given the modern democratic reality of ethno national pluralism, Rawls' political conception of justice is insufficient to ensure democratic stability. Democratic states manage to contain ethnic pluralism while remaining compatible with liberal principles by promoting a corporate national identity. The key, I argue, lies in the particular member ship criteria devised and implemented by the state. (...) Hence, the promotion of a corporate national identity negates state neutrality, but not necessarily political liberalism. Key Words: Israel • Israeli Arabs • national identity • pluralism • Rawls. (shrink)

Political philosophical work on whistleblowing has thus far neglected the role of journalists. A curious oversight, given that the whistleblower’s objective - informing the public about government wrongdoing - can typically not be realized without the media. The present article, therefore, aims to start remedying this neglect by exploring some of the most pressing questions. Accordingly, the paper will be structured as follows: Section 1 will explain why the authorities have treated whistleblowers far more harshly than the journalists who publish (...) their disclosures. Still, the freedom of expression of media workers is less extensive than that of ordinary individuals. Section 2 will explain why by arguing that the freedom of expression of the press, contrary to that of individuals, is not an unconditional good; instead, it is good merely instrumentally. Section 3 considers and refutes an argument for a more expansive press freedom based on the marketplace of ideas model and, in doing so, also discusses some important differences between the ethics of the traditional and the new online media. Often journalists, like whistleblowers, will justify their publications based on leaked classified documents by appealing to the public interest. Yet, this is problematic for two reasons: the public interest is never clarified; and this argument overlooks the fact that the public interest can also be a reason for not publishing about leaked classified documents, even if the leaks are verified. Accordingly, Section 5 sets out to clarify the public interest. Section 4 then discusses two case studies – one concerning unverified leaks, and one concerning verified leaks – in order to demonstrate how we might employ the concept of the public interest in order to determine the permissibility of publishing about leaked classified information in practice. (shrink)

Analytic political philosophy tries to make our political language more precise. But in doing so it risks departing from our natural language and intuitions. This article examines this tension. We...

Welfarism, a position which for a long time enjoyed a hegemonic status in the field of normative economics, holds that the sole ethically relevant information for assessing social states of affairs pertains to individual utilities. Serge-Christophe Kolm presents the Equal-Labour Income Equalization model very explicitly and repeatedly as breaking with the still dominant tradition of welfarism. This paper explores the meaning of this distancing from welfarism found in the ELIE model. After having provided conceptual clarifications concerning both ELIE and welfarism, (...) we discuss various opposing aspects of this model of income redistribution to welfarism. We show that the refusal of welfarism by the ELIE model does not depend mainly on its axiomatic features, but on its deontological perspective. (shrink)

This paper develops a conceptual framework, which can accommodate a wide range of value judgements used in ethical evaluations of extended social states and which can be used to differentiate different categories of value judgements by referring to the type of information on which they may be based. The notions of consequentialism, non-consequentialism, exclusive focus on personal well-being, exclusive focus on utility, etc. are conceptualized in operational ways in the framework. The framework and the discussion of different types of ethical (...) criteria that may be used in evaluating extended social states contribute to conceptual clarity about the ethical bases of public policies. (shrink)

This article examines the explicit and implicit corporate social responsibility (CSR) framework and its implications for leadership style, in a major banking institution. Evidence for existence of the framework's key concepts in relation to leadership styles was explored through the self-reported sensemaking of leaders charged with CSR programme introduction. Qualitative data analysis indicated that explicit CSR is linked to an autocratic leadership style, whereas implicit CSR is more closely aligned with emergent and authentic styles. Although our results reinforced key aspects (...) of the explicit and implicit CSR framework, they demonstrated conflicting systems of both CSR and leadership within our case organisation and highlighted the difficulty in categorising such a complex concept as CSR according to specific frameworks. Overall, our data suggest that the leadership styles, needed to successfully implement explicit and implicit CSR programmes, are in conflict. Given our finding that these CSR systems can coincide within one organisation, we suggest that the debating style of transformational leadership may be the required linchpin. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In its attempt to prove that voters, politicians, and bureaucrats are motivated by the public interest, Self-Interest and Public Interest in Western Politics overlooks a great deal of public-choice research, to which much has been added during the two decades since it was published. The importance of self-interest at both the micro and macro levels of politics becomes clear once one looks not simply at the ?inputs? of a democracy but at its ?outputs? as well. The prevalence of interest (...) groups, the dysfunction of the United States tax code, the lobbying by unions for their members? self-interest, the earmarks in the Patriot Act, the numerous cases of corruption in Western democracies, and the dissatisfaction of citizens with their governments? failings all point to the importance of self-interest in politics. (shrink)

The rational choice paradigm has proved to be a fruitful means of analysis and explanation in various disciplines concerned with questions of practical rationality, but in various attempts to extend its fields of application the deficiencies of the original account of rational choice have become evident. This paper tries to give a systematic overview of ways in which the rational choice paradigm can be extended and modified.

Social processes like voting procedures, debates, etc. depend crucially on the precise rules which define them. This rule sensitivity is illustrated by two examples, in the case of preference aggregation by the parliamentary debate concerning the German capital, and in the case of judgement aggregation by the doctrinal paradox or discursive dilemma. Using social choice functions and the theory of mechanism design, one can formulate what it means for a particular set of rules to be correct under a given game-theoretic (...) solution concept. Furthermore, it is argued that in particular methods from logic and computer science are useful to describe and reason about the rules of play in a precise manner. (shrink)

In modern economics, the use of sympathy and empathy shows significant ambiguity. Sympathy has been used in two different senses. First, it refers to cases where the concern for others directly affects an individual's own welfare . Second, the term has served the purposes of welfare economics, where it is associated with interpersonal comparisons of the extended sympathy type, that is, comparisons between one's own situation in a social state and someone else's in a different social state . On the (...) other hand, empathy has been used interchangeably with sympathy either to render the idea of interdependent utility functions , or to convey the imaginative process of imagining oneself in someone else's place. (shrink)

The economic theory of the consumer, which assumes individual satisfaction as its goal and individual freedom to pursue satisfaction as its sine qua non, has become an important ideological element in political economy. Some have argued that the political dimension of economics has evolved into a kind of "secular theology" that legitimates free market capitalism, which has become a kind of "religion" in the United States [Nelson: 1991, Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics. ; 2001, Economics (...) as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond ; Thurow: 1983, Dangerous Currents: The State of Economics ; Milbank: 1990, Theology and Social Theory, Beyond Secular Reason ]. Consumer theory in its ideological form provides an important base for this religion and is no longer merely a positive framework for understanding consumer choice or estimating market demand. The paper explores the view of the human being, the "anthropology," that is implicit in the economic theory of the consumer and compares its "theological" implications with the corresponding theological anthropologies in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The paper outlines the assumptions of consumer theory and then focuses on three aspects of the theory from a critical theological perspective: the individual in community, property ownership, and human destiny. The principal conclusion is that consumer theory, viewed from this perspective, leads to a reductionist and existentially harmful view of human beings. The maximization of individual satisfaction raises genuine ethical issues when viewed as a political and religious value. The paper argues that the issues could be ameliorated if economists would include more explicit treatment of a social dimension and ethical alternatives in consumer theory and if theologians would give greater attention to economic theory. (shrink)

We identify a new monotonicity condition (called cover monotonicity) for tournament solutions which allows a discrimination among main tournament solutions: The top-cycle, the iterated uncovered set, the minimal covering set, and the bipartisan set are cover monotonic while the uncovered set, Banks set, the Copeland rule, and the Slater rule fail to be so. As cover monotonic tournament solutions induce social choice rules which are Nash implementable in certain non-standard frameworks (such as those set by Bochet and Maniquet (CORE Discussion (...) Paper No. 2006/84, 2006) or Özkal-Sanver and Sanver (Social Choice and Welfare, 26(3), 607–623, 2006), the discrimination generated by cover monotonicity becomes particularly notable when implementability is a concern. (shrink)

When voters’ preferences on candidates are mutually coherent, in the sense that they are at all close to being perfectly single-peaked, perfectly single-troughed, or perfectly polarized, there is a large probability that a Condorcet Winner exists in elections with a small number of candidates. Given this fact, the study develops representations for Condorcet Efficiency of plurality rule as a function of the proximity of voters’ preferences on candidates to being perfectly single-peaked, perfectly single-troughed or perfectly polarized. We find that the (...) widely used plurality rule has Condorcet Efficiency values that behave in very different ways under each of these three models of mutual coherence. (shrink)

Increasingly, it is accepted wisdom for agricultural scientists to get feedback from indigenous peoples—peasants—about new improved seeds and biotechnologies before their official release from the experiment station. What is not yet accepted wisdom is the importance of cognitive science to research on farmer decision making, especially of the type “Why don't they adopt.” In this paper, the impact of the cognitive revolution on models of farmer decision making is described, and decision making models before and after the cognitive revolution are (...) contrasted. An example of a decision model after the cognitive revolution is given by the Malawi farmer's decision whether to use chemical fertilizers or organic fertilizers or both. Results of testing the model show that in Malawi, smallholders' lack of capital and credit are more important factors constraining use of chemical fertilizers than are indigenous beliefs in organic fertilizers or fears of a future dependency on chemicals. (shrink)

Why are political decisions often unfortunate? In replying to this question public‐choice theorists fail to distinguish individual conditions from systemic ones. Instead, they make sweeping claims about the egoism of man and the failure of politics. But the real problem is that we often experience government failures despite the best, the most benign motives on the part of, citizens, politicians, and bureaucrats. Better than the theory of man's innate self‐interest is the theory of the unintended consequences arising from the inherent (...) shortcomings of the political system. To wish well but to do evil—that is the dilemma of politics. (shrink)

Many paradoxes have been revealed in the theory of democracy over the years. This article points to yet another paradox at the heart of democracy, whether in its aggregative or deliberative form.The paradox is this: If you are dealing with a large and heterogeneous community, in which people's choices are menu-sensitive in diverse ways, and if people's cognitive capacities preclude them from considering all items on a large menu simultaneouslythen individuals’ choices may be unstable and manipulable depending on how choices (...) over cognitively-manageable subsets of the menu are partitioned and sequenced, 1 and the collective choice may be likewise unstable and manipulable in consequence.Aggregative democracy casts this argument in terms of ‘alternatives’ on the menu for choice. Deliberative democracy casts this argument in terms of ‘considerations’. The same formal problem arises in both cases. (shrink)

The paper deals briefly with several definitional issues; discusses the concept of image as it determines the way managers see the world; as one aspect of the image, examines the contrasting views of conflict and cooperation in social and organizational relationships; and then presents a typology of corporate responses to pressures for socially responsible behavior: authoritarian, manipulative and bargaining. This typology was developed on the basis of the analysis of a large number of case histories of environmental conflicts, a number (...) of which are included for purposes of illustration. Several historical examples are cited. The inference drawn from this study is that decisions become more responsible as decision-makers come under the scrutiny of and pressure from those affected by the decisions. (shrink)

Policy-makers face an uncertain world. One way of getting a handle on decision-making in such an environment is to rely on evidence. Despite the recent increase in post-fact figures in politics, evidence-based policymaking takes centre stage in policy-setting institutions. Often, however, policy-makers face large volumes of evidence from different sources. Robustness analysis can, prima facie, handle this evidential diversity. Roughly, a hypothesis is supported by robust evidence if the different evidential sources are in agreement. In this thesis, I strengthen the (...) case for the use of robustness analysis in evidence-based policymaking by answering open research questions about this inference technique. First, I argue that existing taxonomies miss a fruitful category of robustness reasoning, that is predictive stability. Second, I claim that derivational robustness analysis – the investigation of whether the results of different models are in agreement – can yield interesting insights even if not the entire relevant model space is covered by available models or if the model results are only partially in agreement. Third, I claim that expert knowledge is necessary to address questions that arise when one applies measurement robustness analysis – the investigation into whether multiple means of measurement yield the same result. Finally, I argue that, in situations where evidence from different measurements is not in agreement, it can be advisable to no longer take all of the evidence into account. This can be done in a rationally defensible way by choosing the most adequate theory or model underlying parts of the evidence set. I discuss examples from climate, medical, and economic policy-making to establish my claims. (shrink)

This article explores public reason liberalism’s indeterminacy problem, a problem that obtains when we admit significant diversity into our justificatory model. The article argues first that Gerald Gaus’s solution to the indeterminacy problem is unsatisfactory and second that, contra Gaus’s concerns, social choice theory is able to solve public reason’s indeterminacy problem. Moreover, social choice theory can do so in a way that avoids the worries raised against Gaus’s solution to the indeterminacy problem as well as the worries Gaus himself (...) raises against the use of social choice mechanisms. Social choice theory thus rescues public reason liberalism by aggregating out of indeterminacy. (shrink)

In this paper, we review two seemingly unrelated debates. In business ethics, the argument is about values: are they universal or emergent? In entrepreneurship, it is about opportunities – are they discovered or constructed? In reality, these debates are similar as they both overlook contingency. We draw insight from pragmatism to define contingency as possibility without necessity. We analyze real-life narratives and show how entrepreneurship and ethics emerge from our discussion as parallel streams of thought.

The problem of how to rationally aggregate probability measures occurs in particular when a group of agents, each holding probabilistic beliefs, needs to rationalise a collective decision on the basis of a single ‘aggregate belief system’ and when an individual whose belief system is compatible with several probability measures wishes to evaluate her options on the basis of a single aggregate prior via classical expected utility theory. We investigate this problem by first recalling some negative results from preference and judgment (...) aggregation theory which show that the aggregate of several probability measures should not be conceived as the probability measure induced by the aggregate of the corresponding expected utility preferences. We describe how McConway’s :410–414, 1981) theory of probabilistic opinion pooling can be generalised to cover the case of the aggregation of infinite profiles of finitely additive probability measures, too; we prove the existence of aggregation functionals satisfying responsiveness axioms à la McConway plus additional desiderata even for infinite electorates. On the basis of the theory of propositional-attitude aggregation, we argue that this is the most natural aggregation theory for probability measures. Our aggregation functionals for the case of infinite electorates are neither oligarchic nor integral-based and satisfy a weak anonymity condition. The delicate set-theoretic status of integral-based aggregation functionals for infinite electorates is discussed. (shrink)

We show that an individual using a choice function is sequentially rational and the decisions he makes are independent of the order of implementation of the rationales if and only if he is rational with the union of the rationales as a base binary relation. When he makes his decisions following a choice correspondence, the sufficiency part of this claim still holds, the necessity part of it does not.

Kuhn argued that scientific theory choice is, in some sense, a rational matter, but one that is not fully determined by shared objective scientific virtues like accuracy, simplicity, and scope. Okasha imports Arrow’s impossibility theorem into the context of theory choice to show that rather than not fully determining theory choice, these virtues cannot determine it at all. If Okasha is right, then there is no function (satisfying certain desirable conditions) from ‘preference’ rankings supplied by scientific virtues over competing theories (...) (or models, or hypotheses) to a single all-things-considered ranking. This threatens the rationality of science. In this paper we show that if Kuhn’s claims about the role that subjective elements play in theory choice are taken seriously, then the threat dissolves. (shrink)

. The purpose of this essay is to argue that considerations of fairness play an essential role in the justification of democratic decision procedures. The first part argues that considerations of fairness form part of a practical authority's legitimacy, and that in the political context, those considerations of fairness entail a principle of equal distribution of political power. Subsequently, the article elaborates on the kind of equality which is required in democratic procedures, arguing that different principles of equality should apply (...) to the deliberation and the decision stages of democracy. Finally, the article concludes with a few sketchy remarks on the possible relations between considerations of fairness and soundness of democratic procedures. (shrink)