L’objectif de cette article est de comprendre la neutralité axiologique non pas comme une exigence épistémologique, mais plutôt comme un idéal éducationnel. Max Weber propose une science basée sur la description factuelle, de laquelle on exclut la formulation de jugements de valeur. Or, il faut démontrer pourquoi il est préférable de séparer les jugements descriptifs des jugements évaluatifs. L’objectif de Weber est de préserver l'autonomie intellectuelle des étudiants. Pour Weber, la classe et l'académie en général sont des lieux politiques. Ces (...) rapports au sein de la classe sont nécessaires pour transmettre des connaissances, des méthodes et le goût de l'autonomie intellectuelle. Or, il serait contraire au principe d'autonomie de laisser le professeur influencer et convaincre ses étudiants, de façon partisane, d'adhérer à certaines thèses normatives. Weber propose ainsi un mécanisme pour éviter que le professeur n'ixnfluence ses étudiants de manière illégitime. (shrink)

Corporate anti-corruption initiatives can make a substantial contribution towards curtailing corruption and advancing efforts to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. However, researchers have observed that underdeveloped assumptions with respect to the conceptualization of corruption and how firms respond to corruption risk impeding the efficacy of anti-corruption programs. We investigate the relationship between the perceived level of corruption in foreign host countries and the organizational structure of subsidiary operations established by multinational corporations. Foreign host market corruption is disaggregated into (...) two components—private and public corruption. We employ an uncertainty-based perspective grounded in transaction cost theory to focus upon the distinct mechanisms through which private and public corruption can each be expected to impact a foreign subsidiary’s organizational structure [wholly-owned subsidiary or a joint venture with a local partner]. We expect that each type of corruption fosters a different type of uncertainty which predominates in shaping the MNC’s choice of foreign subsidiary investment structure. Hypotheses are developed and tested with a sample of 187 entries into 19 foreign host markets. Each type of corruption was found to exert a distinct effect upon the organizational structure of foreign subsidiaries. More precisely, while heightened perceived levels of public corruption were found to motivate MNCs to invest through a JV with a local partner rather than a WOS, more pronounced private corruption precipitated the opposite outcome. (shrink)

The article approaches the topic of social trust from an evolutionary perspective. It begins by summarising the most influential approaches that have defined specific and social trust and ascertains what causes differences in degrees of trust and how the potential risk of deception might be lowered. It then notes that the basis of morality had already been formed during the era of prehistoric man, who was able to create coalitions against aggressors and to socially control the behaviour of deviants. It (...) points out, however, that having a certain predisposition to behaving cooperatively or an increased sensitivity to recognising and not tolerating behaviour aimed at abusing cooperation is not a sufficient guarantee of the fact that people will always (or at least in the majority of situations) favour cooperation over deception. One of the reasons for this is a tendency to favour short-term gains over long-term ones. The article argues that establishing norms (moral, social and legal) produces a higher level of social trust because it not only “encourages” individuals to behave in certain ways in particular situations but also works as a sanction which “discourages” the individual from socially deviant behaviour. The article then focuses on a debate about the causal relationship between social trust and social capital. It discusses the suggestion that political institutions, government and the judiciary may reduce rather than raise levels of social capital and consequently also the level of social trust. This is partly because of their powerful position and the consequent scope for corruption and partly because of the fact that even when attempting to act honestly, representatives of these institutions cannot sufficiently reflect upon dynamic change at the local level. Finally, the article ends by adopting the position that social trust is built primarily from bottom up and so it is risky to continually doubt the very existence and usefulness of social norms and morality and to be governed simply by legal norms. (shrink)

Functioning markets require a state that will enforce property rights; contracts mediated by money; and the prevalence of a certain type of morality that prevents people from cheating in complex exchange relationships. Monetary exchange abstracts from the personal loyalties that bind small groups together, but at the same time it creates an overarching commitment to norms that bind people more loosely in national societies—as long as monetary exchanges are enforced by the state. In the Soviet Union, conversely, the abolition of (...) money as a universal medium of exchange led both to a deterioration of the norms of impersonal morality and to a loss of state capacity. The state lost control of the economy to informal, personally binding economic networks, and it lost its monopoly on violence in competition with sub-state, personal enforcers of impersonal economic commitments between these networks. Thus, capitalism can be seen as diverting people from norms of loyalty to the members of the relatively small groups of which they are a part toward loyalty to the abstract norms that make it possible for anonymous people to deal with each other reliably. (shrink)

In this paper, two claims are made. The main claim is that a fruitful approach for theorizing the political legitimacy of global governance and the proper normative role of civil society actors is the so-called ‘function-sensitive’ approach. The underlying idea of this approach is that the demands of legitimacy may vary depending on function and the relationship between functions. Within this function-sensitive framework, six functions in global governance are analyzed and six principles of legitimacy defended, together constituting a minimalist account (...) of political legitimacy. This account suggests that civil society actors may strengthen political legitimacy by performing five of these functions under certain conditions and insofar as the proposed normative political principles are fulfilled: problem identification, agenda-setting, implementation, enforcement and monitoring, and evaluation. The second claim is critical and is chiselled out against the backdrop of this function-sensitive account, through which I demonstrate that much vagueness and confusion with regard to the proper role of civil society actors for strengthening the political legitimacy of global governance could be traced to the so-called ‘transmission belt’ model, which has gained popularity in international political theory. This model depicts civil society as a transmission belt between the public sphere and decision-making loci, where it is assumed that civil society actors contribute to the strengthening of political legitimacy by transmitting peoples’ preferences, beliefs, and opinions from the former to the latter space by indirectly or directly influencing the decision-making. It is argued that this picture is misleading and generates erroneous prescriptions of how civil society actors should act to increase political legitimacy. (shrink)

The crucial problem in the philosophy of psychiatry is to determine under which conditions certain behaviors, mental states, and personality traits should be regarded as symptoms of mental illnesses. Participants in the debate can be placed on a continuum of positions. On the one side of the continuum, there are naturalists who maintain that the concept of mental illness can be explained by relying on the conceptual apparatus of the natural sciences, such as biology and neuroscience. On the other side (...) of the continuum, there are normativists who maintain that the appropriate characterization of the concept of mental illness cannot avoid reference to epistemic, moral and other social values. Although, this article is primarily an introduction to the debate, we stress the importance of the normativist positions. (shrink)

The turn from deterministic to probabilistic explanations has been used to argue that social science does not explain human action in ways that are incompatible with free will, since, according to some accounts of probabilism, causal factors merely influence actions without determining them. I argue that the notion of nondetermining causal influence is a multifaceted and problematic idea, which notably is unclear about whether the probability is objective or subjective, whether it applies to individual occurrences or merely to sets of (...) occurrences, and whether it is possible for an occurrence to be "almost determined.". (shrink)

Trust is often perceived as having great value. For example, there is a strong belief that trust will bring different sorts of public goods and help us preserve common resources. A related concept which is just as important, but perhaps not explicitly discussed to the same extent as “trust”, is “reliance” or “confidence”. To be able to rely on some agent is often seen as a prerequisite for being able to trust this agent. Up to now, the conceptual discussion about (...) the definition of trust and reliance has been rational in the sense that most people involved have offered arguments for their respective views, or against competing views. While these arguments rely on some criterion or other, these criteria are rarely explicitly stated, and to our knowledge, no systematic account of such criteria has been offered. In this paper we give an account of what criteria we should use to assess tentative definitions of “trust” and “reliance”. We will also offer our own well-founded definitions of “trust” and “reliance”. Trust should be regarded as a kind of reliance and we defend what we call “the accountability view” of trust, by appealing to the desiderata we identify in the first parts of the paper. (shrink)

What is trust? How does it function as a primary virtue for persuasive arguments? How does its presumption contribute to the effectiveness of an argument’s persuasiveness? This presentation will explore these questions and the controversy among scholars regarding how trust is generated and under what conditions it is lost. We will also discuss whether inauthentic trustworthiness is a manipulation used for gaining a fallacious advantage in argumentation.

Is it possible to look at schools as spaces for encounters? Could schools contribute to a deliberative mode of communication in a manner better suited to our own time and to areas where different cultures meet? Inspired primarily by classical (Dewey) and modern (Habermas) pragmatists, I turn to Seyla Benhabib, posing the question whether she supports the proposition that schools can be sites for deliberative communication. I argue that a school that engages in deliberative communication, with its stress on mutual (...) communication between different moral perspectives, gives universalism a procedurally oriented meaning, serving as an arena for encounters that represents a weak public sphere. An interactive universalism of this kind attaches importance to developing an ability and willingness to reason on the basis of the views of others and to change perspectives. In that respect, the institutional arrangements of schools are potential parts of the political dimension of cosmopolitanism, as well as its moral dimension, in terms of the obligations and responsibilities we develop through our institutions and in our actions as human beings towards one another. (shrink)

In recent years, the concept of social capital – broadly defined as co-operative networks based on regular, personal contact and trust – has been widely applied within cross-disciplinary human science research, primarily by economists, political scientists and sociologists. In this article, I argue why and how fieldwork anthropologists should fill a gap in the social capital literature by highlighting how social capital is being built in situ. I suggest that the recent inventions of “bridging” and “bonding” social capital, e.g., inclusive (...) and exclusive types of social capital, are fruitful concepts to apply in an anthropological fieldwork setting. Thus, my case study on the relationship between local people and newcomers in the rural Danish marginal municipality of Ravnsborg seeks to reveal processes of bridging/bonding social capital building. Such a case study at the micro level has general policy implications for a cultural clash between two different groups by demonstrating the complexity of a social capital mix where bonding social capital strongly prevails. This ultimately leads to a “social trap” (Rothstein 2005), implying widespread distrust and serious social and economic costs for a whole population. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The Swedish case bears out Lewin's contention, in Self-Interest and Public Interest in Western Politics, that public spiritedness is much more important than is suggested by public-choice theories positing the universal dominance of self-interestedness. However, in Sweden we find that public spiritedness on the part of the public—as evidenced, for example, in sociotropic voting—was cultivated by political institutions, policies, and rhetoric that transformed a divided, conflictual society into one in which the “public interest” was both coherent and desirable. In (...) turn, this cultivation was the result of decisions by politicians that were, in the most simplistic sense, self-interested, because they secured the politicians’ election and re-election. But the goal of election and re-election was to create a just society. In short, the politicians, too, were public spirited. (shrink)