Over the last six decades work-life balance emerged as an important human resource management aspect for employers. Globally, a wide gamut of work-life balance facilities is being provided by a large number of organisations. The recent economic downturn has witnessed a sudden interruption in the spread and growth of work-life balance facilities at the organisational level. This paper presents the key recessionary reasons which have negatively influenced employee work-life balance. Further, important recession specific benefits which organisations can avail due (...) to enhanced employee work-life balance have been presented, followed by suggestions for adapting work-life balance facilities under current economic downturn as well as in any such situation in the future. (shrink)

In the last six decades, work life and family life spheres of employees have undergone various changes. This paper presents an empirical study of major factors which have influenced employee work-life balance and popular work-life balance tools initiated at organisational level to help an employee balance different life segments such as work, family, personal finances, career and health. Current work-life balance approach, tools and programmes at organisational level primarily address those issues of work and personal life which got highlighted between (...) the 1950’s and later years of the 20th century. Current global recession in the 21st century has created an uncertain economic scenario in which employers and employees are facing new challenges and earlier work-life balance research might not be sufficient enough address the new issues. This calls for further research on work-life balance, for a wider applicability of work-life balance programmes at organisational level. (shrink)

Since the global society and existence cycle constantly runs with unpredictable causes and nuance, i.e., social class segregation is always in front of both modest and powerful nations, it even changes quickly with the scheme fluctuation and being dynamic.

Psychological well-being is a major global concern receiving more scholarly attention following the 2008 Great Recession, and it becomes even more relevant in the context of COVID-19 outbreak. In this study, we investigated the impact of economic uncertainty resulting from natural disasters, epidemics, and financial crisis on individuals' mental health. As unemployment rate exponentially increases, individuals are faced with health and economic concerns. Not all society members are affected to the same extent, and marginalized groups, such as those (...) suffering from chronic mental illnesses or low-income families cannot afford the downsizing, mass lay-offs and lack of access to public health services. Psychiatric profession is familiarized with the phenomenon of intolerance of uncertainty (IU), and we examine how this concept is associated with job uncertainty and social identity disturbance. Several studies have formally investigated the effects of IU, but to our knowledge, this is the first research integrating the psychological well-being, job uncertainty and identity disturbance caused by economic breakdown. Literature points to many reported cases of PTSD, anxiety, depression and suicidal tendencies following major social disasters. Yet, we have undertaken to analyze the subjective experiences underlying the self-harming behaviors in an attempt to fill the methodological gap by drawing insights from prominent psychological, sociological and economic theories. We find economic uncertainty to have a positive relation to job uncertainty and identity disturbance, and a negative relationship with psychological well-being. Psychological well-being depends on coherency between both abstract subjective and concrete objective identity, and when these perceptions are inconsistent, cognitive dissonance arises resulting in identity disturbance. We argue that stability is not associated with monetary advantage only, but also with a wide range of other benefits that are crucial for individuals' growth, satisfaction and sense of identity. Therefore, we propose the implementation of social support and public welfare policies to mitigate health risks during the turbulent socio-economic changes. (shrink)

MERC Global’s International Journal of Management (MERC Global’s IJM) is an international peer-reviewed, open access quarterly journal of management science, being brought out with a view to facilitating effective dissemination of the latest thinking and research with respect to various management issues and problem solving methodology relevant for practicing executives as well as for academicians and researchers working in the field of management around the globe. -/- MERC Global’s IJM publishes articles, research papers, abstracts of doctoral dissertations, (...) book reviews, case studies, short communications and bibliography that are interdisciplinary in nature as well as those within the major disciplines, including: marketing, OB/HR, entrepreneurship, production, operations, accounting, finance, business economics, international business, information technology management, social sector management, public sector management, healthcare management, management strategy, research methods, and so forth. (shrink)

MERC Global’s International Journal of Management (MERC Global’s IJM) is an international peer-reviewed, open access quarterly journal of management science, being brought out with a view to facilitating effective dissemination of the latest thinking and research with regard to various management issues and problem solving methodology relevant for practicing executives as well as for academicians and researchers working in the field of management around the globe. -/- MERC Global’s IJM publishes articles, research papers, abstracts of doctoral dissertations, (...) book reviews, case studies, short communications and bibliography that are interdisciplinary in nature as well as those within the major disciplines, including: marketing, OB/HR, entrepreneurship, production, operations, accounting, finance, business economics, international business, information technology management, social sector management, public sector management, healthcare management, management strategy, research methods etc. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to suggest that most current theories of global justice fail to adequately recognise the importance of global public goods. Broadly speaking, this failing can be attributed at least in part to the complexity of the global context, the individualistic focus of most theories of justice, and the localised nature of the theoretical foundations of most theories of global justice. We argue ? using examples (particularly that of protecting antibiotic efficacy) ? (...) that any truly effective theory of global justice must recognise the importance of global public goods. Global public goods confer significant benefits to individuals yet can only be effectively promoted and preserved through collective action and the restriction of individual choice; something which most theories of justice are structurally unequipped to sufficiently promote. (shrink)

Most bioethicists who address questions to which global justice matters have not considered the significance of the disputes over the correct theory of global justice. Consequently, the significance of the differences between theories of global justice for bioethics has been obscured. In this paper, I consider when and how these differences are important. I argue that certain bioethical problems can be resolved without addressing disagreements about global justice. People with very different views about global justice (...) can converge on the existence of a duty to aid the very badly off — those in absolute poverty — wherever they may be. However, despite agreement on extreme cases, there should be disagreement over the extent of international obligations to those who are only relatively poor. Consequently, different theories of justice will diverge in their implications for a number of important problems in contemporary bioethics. I close by sketching in more detail two contemporary bioethical issues —concerning pharmaceutical patents and the health worker brain drain —and show how responses to them might be developed by cosmopolitan and statist liberals. (shrink)

This study identifies global factors conditioning the global problematics of the direction of social development. Global threats were evaluated and defined as dangerous processes, phenomena, and situations that cause harm to health, safety, well-being, and the lives of all humanity, and require removal. The essence of global risks was defined. These risks were defined as events or conditions that may cause a significant negative effect for several countries or spheres within a strategic period if they occur. (...) Global problems were conceptualized. These problems were defined as phenomena, matters, and situations that are not completely understandable, interesting, actual, require solving and regulation, and in addition do not have unified solutions. Current global challenges were analyzed, defined as strategic guidelines that cause transformational changes and are receiving attention from humanity. Global trends were defined as courses of social development. The composition and role of global actors were described, and defined as international organizations, leading states, regional organizations, powerful corporations, institutional investors, large cities, and well-known personalities. The directions of positive courses of social development were developed by means of using the authors’ mechanism of solving the global problematics. (shrink)

The global pessimistic meta-induction argues from the falsity of scientific theories accepted in the past to the likely falsity of currently accepted scientific theories. I contend that this argument commits a statistical error previously unmentioned in the literature and is self-undermining. I then compare the global pessimistic meta-induction to a local pessimistic meta-induction based on recent negative assessments of the reliability of medical research. If there is any future in drawing pessimistic conclusions from the history of science, it (...) lies in local meta-inductions, but these meta-inductions will not result in global distrust of the results of science. (shrink)

Within the literature in green political theory on global environmental threats one can often find dissatisfaction with liberal theories of justice. This is true even though liberal cosmopolitans regularly point to global environmental problems as one reason for expanding the scope of justice beyond the territorial limits of the state. One of the causes for scepticism towards liberal approaches is that many of the most notable anti-cosmopolitan theories are also advanced by liberals. In this paper, I first explain (...) why one of the strongest expressions of liberal anti-cosmopolitanism cannot simply be dismissed because it may fail to support desired environmental ends. The political conception of justice represents one of the most important challenges to cosmopolitanism generally and is thus a serious challenge to viewing global environmental problems in terms of cosmopolitan justice. Second, I will show through the case of anthropogenic global warming that the political conception of justice under current conditions does have clear cosmopolitan implications despite its proponents' claims. (shrink)

Peter Carruthers has recently argued for a surprising conditional: if a global workspace theory of phenomenal consciousness is both correct and fully reductive, then there are no substantive facts to discover about phenomenal consciousness in nonhuman animals. I present two problems for this conditional. First, it rests on an odd double-standard about the ordinary concept of phenomenal consciousness: its intuitive non-gradability is taken to be unchallengeable by future scientific developments, whereas its intuitive determinacy is predicted to fall by the (...) wayside. Second, it relies on dismissing, prematurely, the live empirical possibility that phenomenal consciousness may be linked to a core global broadcast mechanism that is shared by a wide range of animals. Future developments in the science of consciousness may lead us to reconsider the non-gradability of phenomenal consciousness, but they are unlikely to lead us to accept that there are no facts to discover outside the paradigm case of a healthy adult human. (shrink)

The global/local contrast is ubiquitous in mathematics. This paper explains it with straightforward examples. It is possible to build a circular staircase that is rising at any point (locally) but impossible to build one that rises at all points and comes back to where it started (a global restriction). Differential equations describe the local structure of a process; their solution describes the global structure that results. The interplay between global and local structure is one of the (...) great themes of mathematics, but rarely discussed explicitly. (shrink)

This article questions the use of immigration as a tool to counter global poverty. It argues that poor people have a human right to stay in their home state, which entitles them to receive development assistance without the necessity of migrating abroad. The article thus rejects a popular view in the philosophical literature on immigration which holds that rich states are free to choose between assisting poor people in their home states and admitting them as immigrants when fulfilling duties (...) to assist the global poor. Since the human right to stay is entailed by values that feature prominently in the philosophical debate on immigration, the article further contends that participants in that debate have particular reason to reject the popular ‘choice view’ and endorse the alternative position presented in the article. (shrink)

This paper discusses the relation between Crispin Wright’s alethic pluralism and my global expressivism. I argue that on many topics Wright’s own view counts as expressivism in my sense, but that truth itself is a striking exception. Unlike me, Wright never seems to countenance an expressivist account of truth, though the materials needed are available to him in his approaches to other topics.

This chapter explores global debunking arguments, debunking arguments that aim to give one a global defeater. I defend Alvin Plantinga’s view that global defeaters are possible and, once gained, are impossible to escape by reasoning. They thereby must be extinguished by other means: epistemically propitious actions, luck, or grace. I then distinguish between three types of global defeater—pure-undercutters, undercutters-because-rebutters, and undercutters-while-rebutters—and systematically consider how one can deflect such defeaters. Lastly, since I draw insights from the literature (...) on perhaps the most widely discussed global debunking argument in the literature, Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, I end up responding to many potential problems for it. This includes the so-called conditionalization problem, as well as those raised by Bergmann (2002), Law (2012), Deem (2018), Hendricks and Anderson (2020), and Wielenberg (in Craig and Wielenberg (2021)). (shrink)

The prospect of human genetic enhancement requires an institutional response, and probably the creation of new institutions. The governance of genetic enhancement technologies, moreover, needs to be global in scope. In this article, I analyze the debate on the global governance of human genetic enhancement. I begin by offering a philosophical justification for the need to adopt a global framework for governance of technologies that would facilitate the improvement of non-pathological genetic traits. I then summarize the main (...) concrete proposals that have recently emerged to govern genome editing at the global level. Finally, I develop some impediments that limit the impetus for global governance of genetic enhancement. (shrink)

I focus on a key argument for global external world scepticism resting on the underdetermination thesis: the argument according to which we cannot know any proposition about our physical environment because sense evidence for it equally justifies some sceptical alternative (e.g. the Cartesian demon conjecture). I contend that the underdetermination argument can go through only if the controversial thesis that conceivability is per se a source of evidence for metaphysical possibility is true. I also suggest a reason to doubt (...) that conceivability is per se a source of evidence for metaphysical possibility, and thus to doubt the underdetermination argument. (shrink)

In contemporary democracies, global capitalism exerts a significant influence over how state power is exercised, raising questions about where political power resides in global politics. This question is important, since our specific considerations about justifiability of political power, i.e. political legitimacy, depend on how we characterize political power at the global level. As a partial answer to this question, I argue that our notion of global political legitimacy should be reoriented to include the structural power of (...) the Transnational Capitalist Class as its subject matter. Structural power is a social relation in which the institutional context makes some agents comply with others’ preferences regardless of actors’ intentional efforts to bring about such outcomes. Even when global business elites do not intentionally exercise power to obtain political control of global governance, their structural power has recognizable effects that partly enforce the world order. To advance my claim, I utilize the radical realists’ argument that the notion of legitimacy is applicable to a broader range of social practices that are beyond dyadic power relations, i.e. rulers intentionally exercising power over subjects. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that non-agent collectives, including what one might call the ‘global collective’ consisting of the world’s population taken as a whole, cannot be the bearers of non-distributive moral obligations on pain of violating the principle that ‘ought implies can’. I argue that one prominent line of argument for this conclusion fails because it illicitly relies on a formulation of the ‘ought implies can’ principle which is inapt for contexts which allow for the possibility of non-distributive plural (...) predications of agency, which are precisely the contexts in which we might expect non-agents to be obligation-bearers. (shrink)

These essays are about education, learning, rational inquiry, philosophy, science studies, problem solving, academic inquiry, global problems, wisdom and, above all, the urgent need for an academic revolution. Despite this range and diversity of topics, there is a common underlying theme. Education ought to be devoted, much more than it is, to the exploration real-life, open problems; it ought not to be restricted to learning up solutions to already solved problems - especially if nothing is said about the problems (...) that provoked the solutions in the first place. There should be much more emphasis on learning how to engage in cooperatively rational exploration of problems: even five year olds could begin to learn how to do this. A central task of philosophy ought to be to keep alive awareness of our unsolved fundamental problems - especially our most fundamental problem of all, encompassing all others: How can our human world - and the world of sentient life more generally - imbued with the experiential, consciousness, free will, meaning and value, exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? This is both our fundamental intellectual problem and our fundamental problem of living. As far as the latter is concerned, we are at present heading towards disaster - as our immense, unsolved global problems tell us: population growth, destruction of natural habitats and rapid extinction of species, vast inequalities of wealth and power around the world, pollution of earth, sea and air, our proclivity for war, and above all global warming. If we are to resolve our conflicts and global problems more intelligently, effectively and humanely than we have managed to do so far, then we have to learn how to do it. That, in turn, requires that our institutions of learning, our universities and schools, are rationally designed and devoted to the task. At present they are not. That is the crisis behind all the others. From the past we have inherited the idea that the basic intellectual aim of inquiry ought to be to acquire knowledge. First, knowledge is to be acquired; then, secondarily, it can be applied to help solve social problems. But this is dangerously and damagingly irrational, and it is this irrationality that is, in part, responsible for the genesis of our current global problems, and our current incapacity to solve them. As a matter of supreme urgency, we need to transform academia so that it becomes rationally devoted to helping humanity learn how to make progress towards as good and wise a world as possible. This would involve putting problems of living - including global problems - at the heart of academia, problems of knowledge and technological know-how emerging out of, and feeding back into, the central task to help people tackle problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways. Almost every department and aspect of academia needs to change. We need a new kind of academic inquiry devoted, not just to knowledge, but rather to wisdom - wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, wisdom including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides. So, this is what these essays seek to provoke: a concerted effort to transform our institutions of learning so that they become rationally and effectively devoted to helping us learn how to create a wiser world. With these essays before me, I can see that there is one crucial element of learning about which they say nothing - or nothing explicit. The vital role of play in learning. All mammals - or at any rate almost all mammals - learn by means of play. Cats, tigers, foxes and other predators learn to hunt by means of endless mock fights when kittens and cubs. Deer, sheep and antelope learn to escape by means of playful leaps and bounds when young. We are mammals too. Almost certainly, we learnt how to be adult human beings by means of play during the millions of years we evolved into homo sapiens living in hunting and gathering tribes. Children today, out of school, learn by means of play. Learning by means of play is almost certainly fundamental to our makeup. Education needs to exploit it. Schools and universities need to become places of play. Successful problem solving is often likely to be playful in character. The youthful Einstein called doing physics "getting up to mischief". But our most serious problems of living are so grim, so imbued with suffering, wasted lives and unnecessary death that the idea of approaching them in a playful spirit seems sacrilegious. We need to keep alive tackling of intellectual problems so that playful capacities can be exercised - if for no other reason (and other reasons there are, of course, aplenty). There are two really worthy impulses behind all rational inquiry: delight and compassion. (shrink)

Global ethics is no ordinary subject. It includes some of the most urgent and momentous issues the world faces, such as extreme poverty and climate change. Given this, any adequate review of that subject should, I suggest, ask some questions about the relation between what those working in that subject do and the real-world phenomena that are the object of their study. The main question I focus on in this essay is this: should academics and others working in the (...) field of global ethics take new measures aimed at having more real-world positive impact on the phenomena they study? Should they take new measures, that is, aimed at bringing about more improvements in those phenomena, improvements such as reductions in extreme poverty and in emissions of greenhouse gases? I defend a positive answer to this question against some objections, and also discuss some of the kinds of measure we might take in an attempt to have more positive impact. (shrink)

Act consequentialism states that an act is right if and only if the expected value of its outcome is at least as great as the expected value of any other act’s outcome. Two objections to this view are as follows. The first is that act consequentialism cannot account for our normative ambivalence in cases where agents perform the right act out of bad motives. The second is that act consequentialism is silent on questions of character: questions like ‘What are the (...) right motives to have?’ and ‘What kind of person ought I be?’. These objections have been taken to motivate a move to global consequentialism, on which acts are not the only subjects of normative assessment. Motives and decision-procedures are also judged right or wrong by direct reference to their consequences. In this paper, I argue that these objections fail to motivate the move from act to global consequentialism. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine global public reason as a method of justifying a global state. Ultimately, I conclude that global public reason fails to justify a global state. This is the case, because global public reason faces an unwinnable dilemma. The global public reason theorist must endorse either a hypothetical theory of consent or an actual theory of consent; if she endorses a theory of hypothetical consent, then she fails to justify her principles; (...) and if she endorses a theory of actual consent, her theory will lead to a highly unstable political system. On either side of the dilemma, global public reason faces untenable implications. Although similar criticisms have been advanced against domestic public reason, my argument is not repeating points made before me. My argument is new, in that it raises these objections specifically against global public reason, and in that it shows how, due to increased diversity of belief in the global arena, these problems are more pressing for global public reason than they are for domestic public reason. (shrink)

Dozens of countries have established Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) in the last decade or so, in the majority of cases employing those funds to manage the large revenues gained from selling resources such as oil and gas on a tide of rapidly rising commodity prices. These funds have raised a series of ethical questions, including just how the money contained in such funds should eventually be spent. This article engages with that question, and specifically seeks to connect debates on SWFs (...) with debates onglobaljustice. Just how good are national claims to the great wealth contained in SWFs in the first place? Using the example of Norway's very large SWF – derived from selling North-Sea petroleum – I show that national claims are at least sometimes very weak, with the implication that the wealth in many such funds is ripe for redistribution in the interests of global justice. I conclude by offering some guidance for how the money contained in such funds could best be spent, with the goal of advancing global justice. (shrink)

Many authors hold that collectives, as well as individuals can be the subjects of obligations. Typically these authors have focussed on the obligations of highly structured groups, and of small, informal groups. One might wonder, however, whether there could also be collective obligations which fall on everyone – what I shall call ' global collective obligations '. One reason for thinking that this is not possible has to do with considerations about agency : it seems as though an entity (...) can only be the subject of obligations if it is an agent. In this paper, I try to show that the argument from agency is not a good reason for being sceptical about the existence of global collective obligations : it derives whatever plausibility it has from the idea that claims about obligation need to be addressable to some agent. My suggestion is that we should accept this principle about the addressability of obligations, but deny that the addressee of an obligation need be the subject of that obligation. The collective obligations of unstructured collections of individuals, including global collective obligations, meet the addressability requirement insofar as they require something of the individuals who make up the collective. (shrink)

This article considers how global ethical matters might be approached differently in the English-speaking literature if values salient in sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia were taken seriously. Specifically, after pointing out how indigenous values in both of these major parts of the world tend to prescribe honouring harmonious relationships, the article brings out what such an approach to morality entails for political power, foreign relations and criminal justice. For each major issue, it suggests that harmony likely has implications that (...) differ from approaches that currently dominate Western thought, namely those of utility, autonomy and capability. Lacking the space to systematically defend harmony as a fundamental value, it nonetheless urges theorists not to neglect it in future work. (shrink)

A classification of the global catastrophic risks of AI is presented, along with a comprehensive list of previously identified risks. This classification allows the identification of several new risks. We show that at each level of AI’s intelligence power, separate types of possible catastrophes dominate. Our classification demonstrates that the field of AI risks is diverse, and includes many scenarios beyond the commonly discussed cases of a paperclip maximizer or robot-caused unemployment. Global catastrophic failure could happen at various (...) levels of AI development, namely, before it starts self-improvement, during its takeoff, when it uses various instruments to escape its initial confinement, or after it successfully takes over the world and starts to implement its goal system, which could be plainly unaligned, or feature-flawed friendliness. AI could also halt at later stages of its development either due to technical glitches or ontological problems. Overall, we identified around several dozen scenarios of AI-driven global catastrophe. The extent of this list illustrates that there is no one simple solution to the problem of AI safety, and that AI safety theory is complex and must be customized for each AI development level. (shrink)

Global Research Report – South and East Asia by Jonathan Adams, David Pendlebury, Gordon Rogers & Martin Szomszor. Published by Institute for Scientific Information, Web of Science Group.

The failure of global governance, and how to remedy this, is a recurrent theme in political philosophy. This essay suggests a number of priorities, including: strengthening and reforming the United Nations system; addressing the pessimism in discourse about global governance, and acknowledging the advances which have been made; and engaging the cult of nationalism, with a reclaiming of the universalist ideals of the renaissance. Part of engaging the cult of nationalism also involves re-thinking the role of religion, especially (...) as a force supporting nationalism and the status quo. Ultimately we do not know what future global governance will look like, but the key is to believe that transformation is possible. (shrink)

The present article analyzes the world order in the past, present and future as well as the main factors, foundations and ideas underlying the maintaining and change of the international and global order. The first two sections investigate the evolution of the world order starting from the ancient times up to the late twentieth century. The third section analyzes the origin and decline of the world order based on the American hegemony. The authors reveal the contradictions of the current (...) unipolar world and explain in what way globalization has become more profitable for the developing countries but not for the developed ones. The authors also explain the strengthening belief that the US leading status will inevitably weaken. In this connection we discuss the alternatives of the American strategy and the possibility of the renaissance of the American leadership. The last section presents a factor analysis which allows stating that the world is shifting toward a new balance of power and is likely to become the world without a leader. The new world order will consist of a number of large blocks, coalitions and countries acting within a framework of rules and mutual responsibility. However, the transition to a new world order will take certain time (about two decades). This period, which we denote as the epoch of new coalitions, will involve a reconfiguration of the World System and bring an increasing turbulence and conflict intensity. (shrink)

This chapter proposes the concept of the mindsponge and its underlying themes that explain why and how executives, managers, and corporations could replace waning values in their mindsets with those absorbed during their exposure to multicultural and global settings. It first provides a brief literature review on global mindset and cultural values, which suggests that not only can a mindset be improved, but that it is learning mechanism can also be developed. Then the chapter offers a conceptual framework, (...) called the 'mindsponge', which builds upon earlier works linking mindset to themes of multi-filtering. The process is proposed to help identify emerging values in the transition economy of Vietnam and also to reconfirm existing core values. The concept of mindsponge provides executives, managers, and organizations with not only a practical framework for improving their global mind-set by identifying and strengthening core values, but also capturing emerging opportunities. (shrink)

If global distributive justice or injustice is to exist, there must be something that is just or unjust: something to which the moral assessments at issue attach. I argue in this paper against one popular candidate for that role: the “global basic structure.” I argue that principles of distributive justice that target the global basic structure fail to satisfy a crucial “action guidance” desideratum and that this problem points to an alternative target that philosophers of global (...) justice have yet to widely acknowledge. We ought to exclusively direct our principles at subspheres of global politics: disaggregating global justice for a disaggregated world. (shrink)

Analysing the demands of global justice for the distribution of resources is a complex task and requires consideration of a broad range of issues. Of particular relevance is the effect that different distributions will have on global population growth and individual welfare. Since changes in the consumption and distribution of resources can have major effects on the welfare of the global population, and the rate at which it increases, it is important to establish meaningful principles to ensure (...) a just distribution of resources. In order to establish such principles we must consider the scope of any reproductive rights, and rights to other goods, such as food and health care, as well as examine the extent of duties correlating to those rights. In addition to the impact that distributions of global goods have on the welfare of current generations, it is also important to consider what duties we have, if any, to future generations. -/- The final version of this paper is available to download here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9780470015902.a0024140. (shrink)

This study aims to identify the strengthening of the global entrepreneurial orientation practice for employees at the University of Palestine, where the researchers used the descriptive and analytical approach, through a questionnaire distributed to a sample of employees at the University of Palestine, where the size of the study population is (234) employees and the sample size is (117) Employees, of whom (90) employees responded. The study found a set of results, the most important of which are: that there (...) is a good degree of global entrepreneurial orientation for employees, as the percentage reached (70.25%), and the results also showed that there are no statistically significant differences in the smart university transformation and their impact on the global entrepreneurial trend according to personal and organizational data. The study presented a set of recommendations, the most important of which are: The need to work to enhance the global entrepreneurial orientation of the university's employees. (shrink)

Citation: Braun G, Hellwig MK, Byrnes WM (2007) Global Climate Change and Catholic Responsibility: Facts and Faith Response. Journal of Catholic Social Thought 4(2): 373-401. Abstract: The scientific evidence is now overwhelming that human activity is causing the Earth’s atmosphere to grow hotter, which is leading to global climate change. If current rates of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continue, it is predicted that there will be dramatic changes, including flooding, more intense heat waves and storms, and an increase (...) in disease. Indigenous peoples and the poor will be most severely affected, as will Earth’s wild animals and plants, a quarter of which could become extinct in fifty years. We urgently need to switch to renewable (non-GHG emitting) energy sources, and try to live in a simpler, more sustainable way. In this article, a renewable energy expert, a biochemist, and a theologian have come together to describe the situation in which we find ourselves, and present ideas for a solution that incorporates Catholic social teaching. (shrink)

The paper argues that Information Ethics (IE) can provide a successful approach for coping with the challenges posed by our increasingly globalized reality. After a brief review of some of the most fundamental transformations brought about by the phenomenon of globalization, the article distinguishes between two ways of understanding Global Information Ethics, as an ethics of global communication or as a global-information ethics. It is then argued that cross-cultural, successful interactions among micro and macro agents call for (...) a high level of successful communication, that the latter requires a shared ontology friendly towards the implementation of moral actions, and that this is provided by IE. There follows a brief account of IE and of the ontic trust, the hypothetical pact between all agents and patients presupposed by IE. (shrink)

This introduction begins with two simple case studies that reveal a background of socio-economic complexities that hinder development. The availability of healthcare and the issue of cross-border justice are the key points to be addressed in this study. The chapters consider philosophy, economics, and bioethics in order to provide a global perspective. Two theories come into play in this book—the ideal and non-ideal—which offer insight on why and how things are done.

The Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Simulated Annealing (SA), two techniques for global optimization, were applied to a reduced (simplified) form of the phase problem (RPP) in computational crystallography. Results were compared with those of "enhanced pair flipping" (EPF), a more elaborate problem-specific algorithm incorporating local and global searches. Not surprisingly, EPF did better than the GA or SA approaches, but the existence of GA and SA techniques more advanced than those used in this study suggest that these techniques (...) still hold promise for phase problem applications. The RPP is, furthermore, an excellent test problem for such global optimization methods. (shrink)

We are living in an imbalanced and insecure world. It is torn by violent conflicts on a global scale: between the West and the East, between rich and poor countries, between Christianity and Islam, between the Great Forces and naughty countries, between a global capitalist elite and workers and between the global democratic community and global terrorism. An optimistic thesis will be grounded asserting that varied cultures and civilizations can solve all existing problems and contradictions peacefully (...) and can carry out mutually advantageous cooperation more effectively irrespective of differences between them. Security problems can be explained and defined by means of making use of fundamental philosophical notions. All levels of security are interrelated on a global scale. The problem of regulation of international relations worldwide as regards guaranteeing security of all participants in them is one of primary importance. The present-day multi-polar world could be based on a social and economic pluralism and peace culture. (shrink)

Imagine that you are a farmer living in Kenya. Though you work hard to sell your produce to foreign markets you find yourself unable to do so because affluent countries subsidize their own farmers and erect barriers to trade, like tariffs, thereby undercutting you in the marketplace. As a consequence of their actions you languish in poverty despite your very best efforts. Or, imagine that you are a peasant whose livelihood depends on working in the fields in Indonesia and you (...) are forcibly displaced from your land by a biofuels company because corrupt government officials have stolen the land and sold it to the company. Or, suppose that you work on the coast of Bangladesh but find that increasingly you are unable to cope with salination resulting from sealevel rise – a product of anthropogenic climate change. These, I believe, are cases of global injustice. My question is: What are those who bear the brunt of global injustice entitled to do to secure their, and other people’s, entitlements? Often people focus on the duties of the affluent to respect and uphold the rights of the disadvantaged. This is understandable. But there is a striking omission. Rarely do people analyze, or even mention, what those who lack their entitlements are entitled to do to secure their own rights. This is my focus in this paper. More specifically, I examine what agents are entitled to do to change the underlying social, economic and political practices and structures in a more just direction. (shrink)

The available resources for global health assistance are far outstripped by need. In the face of such scarcity, many people endorse a principle according to which highest priority should be given to the worst off. However, in order for this prioritarian principle to be useful for allocation decisions, policy-makers need to know what it means to be badly off. In this article, we outline a conception of disadvantage suitable for identifying the worst off for the purpose of making health (...) resource allocation decisions. According to our total advantage view: the worst off are those who have the greatest total lifetime disadvantage; advantage foregone due to premature death should be treated in the same way as other ways of being disadvantaged at a time; how badly off someone is depends on the actual outcomes that will befall her without intervention, not her prospects at a time; and all significant forms of disadvantage count for determining who is worst off, not just disadvantage relating to health. We conclude by noting two important implications of the total advantage view: first, that those who die young are among the globally worst off, and second, that the epidemiological shift in the global burden of disease from communicable to non-communicable diseases should not lead to a corresponding shift in global health spending priorities. (shrink)

Drawing on the work of Enrique Dussel, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and other scholars of colonialism, this essay traces colonialist legacies in the popular global-ethics literature. I argue that colonialist elements implicit in prominent global-ethics anthologies can foster attitudes of superiority over and aloofness toward economically struggling communities, even when the texts argue for aid to “the global poor.” Finally, I offer suggestions for how those of us who study and teach global ethics in the affluent world (...) might begin to unsettle colonialist baggage and cultivate skills more conducive to democratic global communities. (shrink)

Traditional Bayesianism requires that an agent’s degrees of belief be represented by a real-valued, probabilistic credence function. However, in many cases it seems that our evidence is not rich enough to warrant such precision. In light of this, some have proposed that we instead represent an agent’s degrees of belief as a set of credence functions. This way, we can respect the evidence by requiring that the set, often called the agent’s credal state, includes all credence functions that are in (...) some sense compatible with the evidence. One known problem for this evidentially motivated imprecise view is that in certain cases, our imprecise credence in a particular proposition will remain the same no matter how much evidence we receive. In this article I argue that the problem is much more general than has been appreciated so far, and that it’s difficult to avoid it without compromising the initial evidentialist motivation. _1_ Introduction _2_ Precision and Its Problems _3_ Imprecise Bayesianism and Respecting Ambiguous Evidence _4_ Local Belief Inertia _5_ From Local to Global Belief Inertia _6_ Responding to Global Belief Inertia _7_ Conclusion. (shrink)

Persons and nations agree on the importance of justice but disagree on its requirements. In The End of History and the Last Man Francis Fukuyama argues that human history moves towards liberal democracy as the final ideal for all societies. It is conceivable that liberal democratic societies will converge to similar conceptions of justice and that global spread of liberal democracies will promote consensus. This paper tries to show that consensus on justice is, nevertheless, unlikely, due to reasonable disagreement. (...) Reason does not give a single rational or reasonable solution to conflicting demands of justice. This means that apart from reason, other factors play a role in what is regarded as just. Jurisdiction is influenced by tradition and zeitgeist. This explains why also liberal democracies, which may recognize similar principles of justice, still arrive at differing rankings of these principles and divergent results of jurisdiction in time and place. (shrink)

According to Wringe 2006 we have good reasons for accepting the existence of Global Collective Obligations - in other words, collective obligations which fall on the world’s population as a whole. One such reason is that the existence of such obligations provides a plausible solution a problem which is sometimes thought to arise if we think that individuals have a right to have their basic needs satisfied. However, obligations of this sort would be of little interest – either theoretical (...) or practical – if they did not give rise, either directly or indirectly, to any kinds of reasons for individuals to behave in certain ways. -/- In this paper, I shall argue that in many situations, forward-looking global obligations give rise to an obligation on individuals to work towards bringing into existence and support an institutional system which will enable their obligations to be met. My argument for this conclusion involves two steps. In the first step, I address a general question about how collective obligations can give rise to individual obligations without being reducible to them, and which obligations they give rise to. Here I give a Kant-inspired argument, based on the principles that ‘ought implies can’ and that the content of the moral law is given by reflecting on how agents should legislate in a kingdom of ends, which is designed to show that collective obligations can give rise to individual obligations. In the second step I apply this principle to the case of global forward-looking obligations. (shrink)

Global studies can be made not only with respect to the humans who inhabit the Earth, they can well be done with respect to biological and abiotic systems of our planet. Such an approach opens wide horizons for the modern university education as it helps to form a global view of various processes. However, we can also ask ourselves whether the limits of our studies can be moved further. Would not it be useful for the students to understand (...) the evolution of our planet within the context of the evolution of our Universe? The need to see this process of development holistically, in its origins and growing complexity, is fundamental to what drives not only science but the human imagination. This shared vision of the grand narrative is one of the most effective ways to conceptualize and integrate our growing knowledge of the Universe, society, and human thought. Note that the respective discipline already exists and it has been developing quite successfully for more than three decades; it is denotes as Big History. (shrink)

Global challenges such as climate change, food security, or public health have become dominant concerns in research and innovation policy. This article examines how responses to these challenges are addressed by governance actors. We argue that appeals to global challenges can give rise to a ‘solution strategy' that presents responses of dominant actors as solutions and a ‘negotiation strategy' that highlights the availability of heterogeneous and often conflicting responses. On the basis of interviews and document analyses, the study (...) identifies both strategies across local, national, and European levels. While our results demonstrate the co-existence of both strategies, we find that global challenges are most commonly highlighted together with the solutions offered by dominant actors. Global challenges are ‘wicked problems' that often become misframed as ‘tame problems’ in governance practice and thereby legitimise dominant responses. (shrink)

The viewing patterns of Global Television in Nigeria seem to have undermined the objectives of local media content in the Nigerian media industry. This paper was designed to examine the factors that indicate that global television affect the development of Nigeria’s local content and why most Nigerians prefer to watch global television programmes at the expense of local television programmes even in the wake of assumed improved local contents in the Nigerian media. The study adopted observational and (...) quantitative methods of acquiring data on reasons why most residents in Nigeria prefer to view foreign programmes and how television viewing of global contents from the foreign stations has affected the development of local media content. The questionnaire was the instrument adopted for eliciting data from primary sources who are television viewers in Nigeria. This study proposed and distributed 300 but recovered 267 copies of the ‘Global Television versus Local Television Viewing’ questionnaire to randomly selected members of the population in Calabar, Cross River State. A review of secondary sources including books and articles on television viewing in Nigeria was carried out. The quantitative data was analysed using simple tables and percentages. Findings revealed that a significant number of Nigerians prefer to watch global television programmes because of their intrinsic interest and creative nature including the educational, informational and entertainment value advantage of the programmes over their local counterparts. The study recommends that the states and federal governments in Nigeria should inject more funds into revitalization of local television stations and should employ more experienced and retrain old television staff in their respective television stations in order to improve on the quality and patronage of local content in the Nigerian media. (shrink)

Can there be a global demos? The current debate about this topic is divided between two opposing camps: the “pessimist” or “impossibilist” camp, which holds that the emergence of a global demos is either conceptually or empirically impossible, and the “optimist” or “possibilist” camp, which holds that the emergence of a global demos is conceptually as well as empirically possible and an embryonic version of it already exists. However, the two camps agree neither on a common working (...) definition of a global demos, nor on the relevant empirical facts, so it is difficult to reconcile their conflicting outlooks. We seek to move the debate beyond this stalemate. We argue that existing conceptions of a demos are ill-suited for capturing what kind of a global demos is needed to facilitate good global governance, and we propose a new conception of a demos that is better suited for this purpose. We suggest that some of the most prominent conceptions of a demos have focused too much on who the members of a demos are and too little on what functional characteristics the demos must have in order to perform its role in facilitating governance within the relevant domain. Our new proposal shifts the emphasis from the first, “compositional” question to the second, “performative” one, and provides a more “agency-based” account of a global demos. The key criterion that a collection of individuals must meet in order to qualify as a demos is that it is not merely demarcated by an appropriate membership criterion, but that it can be organized, democratically, so as to function as a state-like agent. Compared to the existing, predominantly “compositional” approaches to thinking about the demos, this agency-based approach puts us into a much better position to assess the empirical prospects for the emergence of a global demos that can facilitate good global governance. (shrink)