Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Login
  3. Choice Award Winners

Refine listing

Refine listing

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

2606 results in Choice Award Winners

Page 97 of 131

  • 26 - Care

  • from C
  • Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
    Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    11 December 2014, pp 84-86

  • Summary

    Philosophical theories centered on the notion of care were initially inspired by the research of psychologist Carol Gilligan, who challenged Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. Kohlberg’s theory presupposed that when people reach full moral maturity their moral reasoning will appeal to notions such as duty, rights, justice, universality, and impartiality. Kohlberg’s theory also assumed that the core of morality is deontological and that the most important aspects of morality are to be understood in terms of these same notions. Gilligan argued that this way of understanding morality - which she termed “the ethics of justice” - led Kohlberg to overlook or misinterpret important moral concerns that some research subjects were expressing. In particular, Gilligan claimed that her research with women revealed a different moral voice - an “ethics of care”– which relected distinctive moral sensibilities:

    In this conception, the moral problem arises from conlicting responsibilities rather than from competing rights and requires for its resolution a mode of thinking that is contextual and narrative rather than formal and abstract. This conception of morality as concerned with the activity of care centers moral development around the understanding of responsibility and relationships, just as the conception of morality as fairness ties moral development to the understanding of rights and rules. (Gilligan 1982, 19)

  • 130 - Migration

  • from M
  • Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
    Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    11 December 2014, pp 496-498

  • Summary

    Migration in Rawls’s political philosophy is notable primarily because of its absence. During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, issues of migration became prominent, both in political practice and in activist response to that practice. Rawls’s work, however, contains very few explicit discussions of the issue of migration. Nevertheless, Rawls’s work has been enormously influential in analyses of the justice of immigration, and an account of justice in immigration can also be found in some scattered remarks in Rawls’s The Law of Peoples.

    Rawls’s domestic political philosophy assumes that migration does not exist; he assumes that an individual enters society at birth, and exits only at death (TJ 152; PL 12, 40). Rawls is, here, making a simplifying assumption, one that is justiied with reference to his focus on justice in the basic structure of a particular society; he is not making the statement that migration in fact does not exist, nor that it does not stand in need of analysis from the standpoint of justice. Nevertheless, this is a striking assumption. Throughout his domestic work on political justice, he consistently ignores the issue of migration – with one small exception, when he argues that a just political community cannot prohibit emigration (PL 277). The issue of immigration, however, is ignored entirely.

  • Part I - Estimating the costs of nuclear power

  • François Lévêque
  • Book:
    The Economics and Uncertainties of Nuclear Power
    Published online:
    05 January 2015
    Print publication:
    11 December 2014, pp 7-8

  • Summary

    Estimating the costs of nuclear power

    The debate on this topic is fairly confusing. Some present electricity production using nuclear power as an affordable solution, others maintain it is too expensive. These widely divergent views prompt fears among consumers and voters that they are being manipulated: each side is just defending its own interests and the true cost of nuclear power is being concealed.

    Companies and non-governmental organizations certainly adopt whatever position suits them best. But at the same time, the notion of just one ‘true’ cost is misleading. As we shall see in this section there is no such thing as the cost of nuclear power: we must reason in terms of costs and draw a distinction between a private cost and a social cost. The private cost is what an operator examines before deciding whether it is opportune to build a new nuclear power plant. This cost varies between different investors, particularly as a function of their attitude to risks. On the other hand the social cost weighs on society, which may take into account the risk of proliferation, or the benefits of avoiding carbon dioxide emissions, among others. The cost of actually building new plant differs from one country to the next.

  • 31 - Civic humanism

  • from C
  • Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
    Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    11 December 2014, pp 100-101

  • Summary

    This expression refers to a particular interpretation of the core normative commitments of the republican tradition of political thought, which is a topic of signiicant debate among historians of ideas. Based on what they take to be the experience of civic life in Ancient Athens, and inspired by Aristotle’s work, civic humanists claim that human beings are essentially social and political beings, and that they can only lead lourishing lives if they engage in virtuous political activity aimed at the common good. One might interpret this thesis weakly to mean that citizens’ political participation is necessary to sustain well-functioning political institutions and the social conditions favorable to the enjoyment of good lives. After all, it would be difficult for people to flourish if they lived in societies plagued by injustice and corruption. But the civic humanists’ thesis is stronger. It is that any good or lourishing life must include political participation as a key element. Political participation is considered not only intrinsically valuable, but also something whose absence would seriously diminish the value of citizens’ lives. This view of the intrinsic value of political activity has been attributed to Jean Jacques Rousseau andHannah Arendt, among others.

    In Rawlsian terms, civic humanism is a partially comprehensive doctrine that recommends political activity and its associated virtues as fundamental personal goods.

  • 63 - Duty of civility

  • from D
  • Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
    Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    11 December 2014, pp 229-233

  • Summary

    The duty of civility refers to the set of moral requirements that are associated with Rawls’s idea of public reason and its corresponding view of liberal-democratic political legitimacy. Indeed this duty is said to be one of the central “innovations” of Rawls’s theory of public reason (PL 253). It applies to both government oficials and ordinary citizens in the public political forum when they are resolving constitutional essentials andmatters of basic justice. The duty of civility instructs them to “be able to explain to one another on those fundamental questions how the principles and policies they advocate and vote for can be supported by the political values of public reason” (PL 217).

    A principal obligation of the duty of civility, then, involves the practice of public justiication. Citizens and oficials should identify and sometimes publicly communicate suitable justifying reasons for their exercise of coercive political power, at least with respect to constitutional essentials andmatters of basic justice. Public justiication is “not simply valid reasoning, but argument addressed to others” (PL 465). It proceeds on the basis of public reasoning, that is, by way of ascertainable evidence and reasons and arguments drawn from a reasonable political conception of justice, consistent with the liberal principle of legitimacy based on the criterion of reciprocity. According to this criterion, the exercise of political power is legitimate only when “we sincerely believe that the reasons we would offer for our political activities – were we to state them as government oficials – are suficient, and we also reasonably think that other citizens might reasonably accept those reasons” (PL 447).

  • 175 - Rational choice theory

  • from R
  • Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
    Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    11 December 2014, pp 683-684

  • Summary

    Rational Choice Theory (RCT) concerns the formal structure of the choices of individuals and the preference ordering behind their choices. It identifies a set of basic properties that rational individuals are supposed to satisfy. The most basic properties of rational preferences are reflexivity, transitivity, and completeness. If the choices include risk, the independence of irrelevant alternatives is thought to be one additional basic property. Many economists believe that these properties not only help us to explain and predict individuals’ behaviors but also have normative force in their own right.

    RCT plays a fundamental role in TJ as Rawls contends that parties in the original position would unanimously choose his principles of justice through rational choice. In fact, he refers to the literature of rational choice throughout TJ. At the beginning of TJ (12), Rawls claims that “the concept of rationality must be interpreted as far as possible in the narrow sense, standard in economic theory, of taking the most effective means to given ends,” and that “one must try to avoid introducing into it any controversial ethical elements.” However, he does add several substantive qualifications. First, the rational parties aim to maximize the expectations of primary goods, regardless of their rational plan of life. Second, the rational parties are mutually disinterested and not moved by envy. Third, in considering their rational life plan, the rational parties accept the Aristotelian principle, according to which people enjoy the exercise of their developed capacities, and this enjoyment increases as the capacity gets more developed. These three qualifications do not appear in standard RCT. Rawls adds substantive qualifications and assumptions to the standard RCT because, according to him, the parties in the original position are supposed to not only be rational in a formal sense, but also in their choice situation to represent citizens who have a capacity for reasonableness and a sense of justice.

  • 201 - Sidgwick, Henry

  • from S
  • Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
    Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    11 December 2014, pp 773-776

  • Summary

    The British philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) has had a major influence on Rawls, especially on his methodology. “The Methods of Ethics is, I believe, the outstanding achievement in modern moral theory…the first truly academic work in moral theory, modern in both the method and spirit” (CP 341). In LHPP, Rawls dedicates four lectures to Sidgwick and he also wrote a “Foreword” for Methods of Ethics when it was last republished (1981, v–vi).

    Rawls has borrowed heavily from Sidgwick’s notion of the methods of ethics. “Sidgwick assumes that a rational method is one that can be applied to all rational (and reasonable) human beings to get the same result” (LHPP 381).Moral theory as an independent, impartial, and systematic inquiry should start, says Sidgwick, with “an examination at once expository and critical, of the different methods of obtaining reasoned convictions as to what ought to be done which are to be found – either explicit or implicit – in the moral consciousness of mankind generally” (Sidgwick 1981, V; and LHPP 381). Such comparison is the only way to reach a “reasoned and satisfactory justification” (LHPP 379) in a domain usually devoid of objectivity. The most significant moral conceptions in the philosophical tradition to be examined and compared are “egoistic hedonism, intuitionism and universal hedonism (the classical utilitarian doctrine)” (LHPP 378–379). There lies the inspiration for Rawls’s own comparative method of justification: justice as fairness should be argued for on the basis of an impartial comparison between utilitarianism, perfectionism and intuitionism drawn by the parties in the original position and endorsed in reflective equilibrium (TJ 42).

  • Six - The magic of Bayesian analysis

  • François Lévêque
  • Book:
    The Economics and Uncertainties of Nuclear Power
    Published online:
    05 January 2015
    Print publication:
    11 December 2014, pp 118-138

  • Summary

    An English Presbyterian minister and a French mathematician forged a magic key which enables us to update our probabilistic judgements, use probability as a basis for reasoning without being a statistician, reconcile objective and subjective probability, combine observed frequency and calculated probability, and predict the probability of the next event.

    The Bayes–Laplace rule

    Thomas Bayes was the first person to use the concept of conditional probability, for which Pierre-Simon Laplace found a more widespread application. (See the box.) We presented this concept briefly in Chapter 4 on the escalating severity of nuclear accidents, more specifically in relation to the probability of massive release of radioactive material in the event of a core melt, or in other words given that core meltdown has occurred. This probability is denoted using a vertical bar: p(release|melt). In a general way, A and B being two events, the conditional probability is written as p(A|B), which reads as ‘the probability of A given B’. Or, to be more precise, we should refer to two conditional probabilities; as we are focusing on two events, we may also formulate the conditional probability p(B|A), the probability of B given A. In the case of a core melt and the release of radioactivity, p(melt|release) is almost equal to one: with just a few exceptions (water loss from a spent-fuel pool) a massive release is impossible unless the core has melted.

  • 81 - Fundamental ideas (in justice as fairness)

  • from F
  • Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
    Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    11 December 2014, pp 306-308

  • Summary

    Justice as fairness involves six fundamental ideas. They are laid out in a sequence in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (part i; see also PL lecture 1). The irst is the organizing idea, which the following ive make more determinate by addressing important questions (JF 24–25). The ideas are worked out on the basis of a relection on aspects of the public political culture of a democratic society (JF 5).

  • (1) The central, organizing idea is that of society as a fair system of cooperation over time from one generation to the next. Social cooperation has at least three features: it is guided by publicly recognized rules and procedures, it includes terms of cooperation that are fair (they can reasonably be accepted by its participants and involve reciprocity or mutuality), and it tracks each participant’s rational advantage or good (JF 6). The terms of social cooperation (the fundamental rights, liberties, opportunities, and allocation of benefits and burdens it involves) are speciied by the principles of justice (JF 7).

  • (2) What would result when the irst idea is fully realized? The result would be a well-ordered society, a society effectively regulated by the principles of justice (JF 8–9).

  • (3) What do the principles of justice apply to, exactly? They apply primarily to the basic structure of society, to “the way in which the main political and social institutions of society it together into one system of social cooperation, and the way they assign basic rights and duties and regulate the division of advantages that arises from social cooperation over time” (JF 10). The basic structure includes, for example, a society’s constitution, its economic structure, and the family in some form.

  • Thirteen - International governance to combat proliferation

  • François Lévêque
  • Book:
    The Economics and Uncertainties of Nuclear Power
    Published online:
    05 January 2015
    Print publication:
    11 December 2014, pp 265-295

  • Summary

    The proliferation of nuclear weapons is a collective security issue, but microeconomics does not throw much light on efforts to manage this particular global public good, and the associated pitfalls. Political analysis and the application of game theory seem more helpful for understanding rivalry between states and their various strategies. Much has been written on global politics and strategy, and more specifically on the arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States, followed by de-escalation. We shall consequently not address the rising number of warheads deployed by nuclear powers, referred to as vertical proliferation. Its only connection with the economics of nuclear power is historical.

    On the other hand, horizontal proliferation – the acquisition of nuclear weapons by countries not previously armed – is linked to the development of this energy. We have already cited the example of Pakistan, which has used civilian nuclear power as cover. We have also noted the utopian attitude of advocates of the Atoms for Peace doctrine, who believed that help with developing nuclear power could contribute to preventing widespread nuclear armament. This form of proliferation, by the gradual spread of nuclearized territory all over the planet, is linked to trade. The larger the number of new countries adopting nuclear power, the greater the risk of proliferation. The vast majority of the countries which currently own nuclear power plants have certainly refrained from developing military applications, but there is no technical obstacle to them doing so in the future. They already have the fissile materials, and the necessary scientific and engineering skills. Japan, Brazil or indeed South Korea could very rapidly become nuclear powers. Nations on the verge of deploying nuclear power, such as Turkey or the United Arab Emirates, could start by abstaining, then change their minds. It is also interesting to note that many of today's aspiring nuclear-power nations display features which justify fears of further proliferation. Compared with the countries already exploiting this technology, they are, on average, characterized by more widespread corruption and greater political instability, weaker democratic institutions, higher crime rates and more frequent terrorist attacks. All these factors potentially increase the risk of nuclear power being diverted for military ends.

  • 6 - Aquinas, Thomas

  • from A
  • Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
    Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    11 December 2014, pp 14-16

  • Summary

    The mature Rawls viewed St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae as a “magniicent” achievement. Just as Leibniz rendered the scientiic discoveries of the seventeenth century compatible with Christian orthodoxy, Aquinas (1225–1274) confronted the new Aristotelianism of the thirteenth century so as to restate Christian theology in Aristotelian terms (LHMP 12, 106).

    This praise of Aquinas contrasts with the very early Rawls, who opposed the naturalism of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas to Christian personalism. Rawls defended the latter and denigrated the former. By “naturalism” Rawls did not mean “materialism.” Rather, naturalists like Aquinas were those who saw human beings as essentially oriented toward an abstract good instead of toward a personal God (and toward human persons). The danger, he thought, was that naturalists like Aquinas turned God into an object and, because of this depersonalized character of naturalism, encourage egoism and hence the destruction of community (BIMSF 119–120, 161–162, 178, 182, 189, 209, 217, 220–221).

    Both the very early Rawls and the 1997 Rawls of “On My Religion” opposed the predeterminism of Aquinas (alleged to be every bit as severe as that of Calvin) as well as Aquinas’ effort to offer rational proofs for God’s existence. Throughout his life Rawls seemed to remain a ideist (BIMSF 224, 247, 263–264).

  • 112 - Legitimacy

  • from L
  • Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
    Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    11 December 2014, pp 422-427

  • Summary

    Political legitimacy does not figure in Rawls’s early work, notably in A Theory of Justice. In Theory he does make use of the broader idea of “legitimate expectations” that citizens come to have when they participate in a social practice, but his main concern is to specify the principles of justice to which the basic structure of society, including the structure of political authority, must conform. Not surprisingly, legitimacy is a major theme of his later work, in which he develops his account of political liberalism. Legitimacy figures in two principal ways: one is the idea of “legitimate law,” and the other is the “principle of legitimacy,” or what he sometimes calls the “liberal (or democratic) principle of legitimacy.” Both of these uses are related to the conventional notion of a legitimate authority as having the right to exercise political power to make a law or decide policy, with those subject to that authority having at least a presumptive obligation to obey. For Rawls, legitimate law results from a properly constituted political process, and “is politically (morally) binding on [one] as a citizen and is to be accepted as such” (CP 578). Such a properly constituted process must accord with the principle of legitimacy.

    The principle of legitimacy arises directly from the defining problem of political liberalism, which is to explain how a society can be well-ordered by a conception of justice when its citizens adhere to conflicting comprehensive doctrines, each of which may give rise to its own conception of justice. Political liberalism solves that problem by proposing a political conception of justice that all reasonable citizens may accept because it is not based upon the concepts or principles of any particular comprehensive doctrine.

  • 4 - Altruism

  • from A
  • Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
    Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    11 December 2014, pp 9-10

  • Summary

    Altruism is the sacriice of one’s own interests or good for the benefit of others. Egoism, concern for one’s own good alone, is its opposite. In general, altruism does not require that one promote the interests of others equally, so an altruist may, for example, sacriice her own interests for those of the members of an exclusive group such as family or community members. Rawls says that classical utilitarianism “is the ethic of perfect altruists” (TJ 165). The suggestion is that a “perfect” altruist would be a perfectly impartial altruist, although as a technical matter, utilitarianism allows one’s own interests to count on equal terms with the interests of others.

    Any moral doctrine that requires individuals to sacriice their own interests for those of others will incorporate altruistic elements, although not necessarily raised to a irst principle. Justice as fairness certainly may require individuals to make sacriices, but it does so in accordance with an ideal of reciprocity. Reciprocity, Rawls holds, “lies between the ideal of impartiality, which is altruistic (being moved by the general good), and the idea of mutual advantage understood as everyone’s being advantaged with respect to each person’s present or expected future situation as things are” (PL 16–17). He also associates reciprocity with the idea of the reasonable: “Reasonable persons, we say, are notmoved by the general good as such but desire for its own sake a social world in which they, as free and equal, can cooperate with others on terms all can accept” (PL 50).

  • Prologue: Blog entry from Jonathan Hey

  • Tony Hey, Gyuri Pápay, University of Southampton
  • Book:
    The Computing Universe
    Published online:
    05 December 2014
    Print publication:
    08 December 2014, pp xv-xvi

  • Summary

    Key moments in tech history

    I can still, and perhaps will always, remember:

    • The first day we connected our NES to our TV and Mario appeared

    • The first day I instant messaged a friend using MSN Messenger from France to England

    • The first day I was doing a presentation and said I could get online without a cable

    • The first day I was carrying my laptop between rooms and an email popped up on my computer

    • The first day I tentatively spoke into my computer and my friend’s voice came back

    • The first day the map on my phone automatically figured out where I was

    Each of these moments separately blew my mind on the day. It was like magic when they happened. The closest I have had recently was probably the first successful call using Facetime and waving my hand at a Kinect sensor. (Another, that most people probably haven’t experienced, was watching a glass door instantly turn opaque at the touch of a button. Unbelievable.)

    Each of these moments blew me away because things happened that weren’t even part of my expectations. I expect our expectations these days have now risen sufficiently high that it’ll probably take teleportation to get a similar effect from a teenager. Maybe life would be more fun if we kept our expectations low?

Page 97 of 131