Capacity development is critical to long-term conservation success, yet we lack a robust and rigorous understanding of how well its effects are being evaluated. A comprehensive summary of who is monitoring and evaluating capacity development interventions, what is being evaluated and how, would help in the development of evidence-based guidance to inform design and implementation decisions for future capacity development interventions and evaluations of their effectiveness. We built an evidence map by reviewing peer-reviewed and grey literature published since 2000, to identify case studies evaluating capacity development interventions in biodiversity conservation and natural resource management. We used inductive and deductive approaches to develop a coding strategy for studies that met our criteria, extracting data on the type of capacity development intervention, evaluation methods, data and analysis types, categories of outputs and outcomes assessed, and whether the study had a clear causal model and/or used a systems approach. We found that almost all studies assessed multiple outcome types: most frequent was change in knowledge, followed by behaviour, then attitude. Few studies evaluated conservation outcomes. Less than half included an explicit causal model linking interventions to expected outcomes. Half of the studies considered external factors that could influence the efficacy of the capacity development intervention, and few used an explicit systems approach. We used framework synthesis to situate our evidence map within the broader literature on capacity development evaluation. Our evidence map (including a visual heat map) highlights areas of low and high representation in investment in research on the evaluation of capacity development.

Is belief in God rational? Over a century ago, Hegel (following Kant) and Søren Kierkegaard established one set of parameters for discussing that question, but in a language that appears opaque to many philosophers today. Very recently, Alvin Plantinga, James Ross, and George Mavrodes have been debating similar issues in a modern analytic idiom. In this essay, I want to use this modern philosophical language in an attempt to clarify certain issues surrounding the relevant notion of “rationality” and related notions essential to the natural theologian, and in so doing attempt to make presentable the dispute between Hegel and Kierkegaard.

For our purposes here, I take “rationality” to be predicated of an epistemological concept of belief, even if, as I believe, any such notion would have to be a special case and a logical derivative of a more general notion of “rationality” as primarily practical.

Unwarranted antagonism between reason and the passions is an ancient problem, dating back at least to Plato. Even philosophers who sought to give the passions their due—David Hume for example—juxtaposed reason and emotion and contrasted them as slave and master (or vice versa). The point of a so-called “cognitive” theory of emotion, simply stated, is to deny this antagonism. The most succinct (if not very informative) statement of the cognitivist view is Nietzsche's: “as if every passion did not possess its quantum of reason.” Hume's own theory anticipated such a synthesis (in his awkward analysis of “ideas” as both necessary causes and effects of emotions) while Spinoza and Hobbes clearly defended cognitive theories with the wisdom of reconciliation in mind. The aim of a cognitive theory is not to reduce volatile emotion to cool and calm belief, nor is the emphasis on emotion a romantic attempt to extol the passions and excoriate reason—though that exercise may have its place in philosophy too; it is rather to understand reason and the passions together and appreciate their shared properties, similarities and complementarity as well as their obvious differences and oppositions. So understood, cognitive theories have, generically, gained widespread acceptance; only a few reactionaries in philosophy and psychology still insist on a cognition-free concept of emotion, however backhandedly cognitive concepts might be acknowledged as presuppositions, causal preconditions or criteria for the appropriate labelling of emotion rather than as proper constituents of emotion.

I have been arguing, for almost thirty years now, that emotions have been unduly neglected in philosophy. Back in the seventies, it was an argument that attracted little sympathy. I have also been arguing that emotions are a ripe for philosophical analysis, a view that, as evidenced by the Manchester 2001 conference and a large number of excellent publications, has now become mainstream. My own analysis of emotion, first published in 1973, challenged the sharp divide between emotions and rationality, insisted that we reject the established notion that the emotions are involuntary, and argued, in a brief slogan, that ‘emotions are judgments.’ Since then, although the specific term ‘judgment’ has come under considerable fire and my voluntarist thesis continues to attract incredulousness the general approach I took to emotions has been widely accepted in both philosophy and the social sciences. When Paul Griffiths took on what he misleadingly characterized as ‘propositional attitude’ theories of emotion as the enemy of all that was true and scientifically worthy, I knew that we had made it. Such ferocious abuse is surely a sign that we had shifted, in Kuhnian terms, from being revolutionary to becoming the ‘normal’ paradigm. The current counter-revolution of affect programmes and neuro-reductionism says a lot about who we are and how far we have come. (Progress in philosophy is moved more by this drama of one outrageous thesis after another—once called ‘dialectic’—than by cautious, careful argument.)

Should the responsibilities of business managers be understood independently of the social circumstances and “market forces” that surround them, or (in accord with empiricism and the social sciences) are agents and their choices shaped by their circumstances, free only insofar as they act in accordance with antecedently established dispositions, their “character”? Virtue ethics, of which I consider myself a proponent, shares with empiricism this emphasis on character as well as an affinity with the social sciences. But recent criticisms of both empiricist and virtue ethical accounts of character deny even this apparent compromise between agency and environment. Here is an account of character that emphasizes dynamic interaction both in the formation and in the interplay between personal agency and responsibility on the one hand and social pressures and the environment on the other.

As we enter the new millennium, there is an overriding question facing global corporate free enterprise, and that is whether the corporations that now or will control and affect so much of the planet’s humanity and resources can demonstrate not only their profitability but their integrity. The old quasi-theological arguments still persist, whether multinational corporations and capitalism in general best serve humanity; whether corporations and capitalism are good or evil or whether they are, at best, amoral; whether corporations can have a conscience; and whether responsibility can be expected of them.

Give style to your character, a great and rare art.

Nietzsche Gay Science (290)

What are we to make of Nietzsche? There has been an explosion of scholarship over the past twenty years, much of it revealing and insightful, a good deal of it controversial if not polemical. The controversy and polemics are for the most part straight from Nietzsche, of course, and the scholarly disputes over what he ‘really’ meant are rather innocuous and often academic compared with what Nietzsche meant (or might have meant) with his conscientiously inflammatory rhetoric and hyperbole. We have been treated to extended debates about Nietzsche's politics, his attacks on Christianity and morality, his famed notion of the übermensch and his less lampooned (but more edifying) doctrine of the ‘eternal recurrence’. We have recently heard Nietzsche reinterpreted as an analytic philosopher, as a deconstructionist, as a feminist, even as a closet Christian and a liberal. Stephen Aschheim suggests in his recent book that Nietzsche provides us with something like a Rorschach test, inviting readers with amazingly different commitments and ideologies to ‘make their own Nietzsche’ (as a Times Literary Supplement review bluntly put it). But there is another approach to Nietzsche, something quite different from interpreting him in terms of his various ‘theses’ and positions, unpacking his ‘system’ or repeating unhelpfully that he displayed no such coherence and consistency, something more than finding out ‘who’ Nietzsche is as opposed to what we have made out of him. The simplest way of getting at this alternative approach might be to ask, what Nietzsche would make of us? I grant that this is a bit cryptic, and it invites a variety of unflattering answers. But I think it is very much in the spirit of what he (and his spokesman Zarathustra) are all about. It is an intimately personal approach to Nietzsche, an approach that will, no doubt, be somewhat different for each and every one of us. But that, too, of course, is just what Nietzsche (and Zarathustra) would have demanded.

Fifty years ago, two Princeton professors established game theory as an important new branch of applied mathematics. Game theory has become a celebrated discipline in its own right, and it now plays a prestigious role in many disciplines, including ethics, due in particular to the neo-Hobbesian thinking of David Gauthier and others. Now it is perched at the edge of business ethics. I believe that it is dangerous and demeaning. It makes us look the wrong way at business, reinforcing a destructive obsession with measurable outcomes and a false sense of competition. It falsely characterizes or insidiously advocates a style of human behavior that is utterly unacceptable. To put the matter quite crudely, a person who actually practiced the form of “rationality” advocated by game theory would be something of a monster.

We should not ask for more precision than a subject is capable of giving us. — Aristotle, (384–322 B.C.E.) Nicomachean Ethics Bk. 1

Not that you won or lost—but how you played the game. — Grantland Rice (1880–1954) “Alumnus Football”