bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Autonomy in Political Theory
Authors: Knight Amber , Miller Joshua
Published: April 2023

This chapter provides the normative grounding for the book through a brief survey of how autonomy has been conceptualized, valued, and politicized in the Western canon of political thought. Traditionally defined as an individual’s capacity for self-rule, autonomy has been criticized from various schools of thought. Feminist theorists and critical disability scholars have been especially critical of its associations with unrealistic masculinist and ableist conceptions of citizenship. We share these concerns, but our goal in this chapter is to rethink autonomy without giving it up. We do so by endorsing a relational conception of autonomy—one that foregrounds socialization and takes stock of how oppressive social relations negatively impact on the exercise of autonomy in practice—within a perfectionist liberal framework. Ultimately, we show how a relational understanding of reproductive autonomy committed to perfectionist liberal politics is descriptively accurate, is normatively desirable, and has more political purchase than its mainstream liberal predecessor.
The Healthcare System
Authors: Knight Amber , Miller Joshua
Published: April 2023

This chapter examines barriers to reproductive autonomy within medical institutions through the lens of Miranda Fricker’s notion of “testimonial justice.” Medical professionals bear professional obligations to counsel patients with accurate, comprehensive information—delivered in a clear and non-directive manner—in order to facilitate patient-informed consent. While many physicians attempt to satisfy this responsibility, numerous studies have demonstrated how ableist biases permeate medical institutions. Such biases often result in physicians offering patients unduly negative quality-of-life assessments that are at odds with the positive testimony of people with Down syndrome and their family members. Moreover, physicians have legal incentives to recommend termination in order to mitigate the risk of wrongful birth litigation. Among other suggestions, we encourage federal oversight of the acquisition and dissemination of information that prospective parents receive following a positive diagnosis of Down syndrome to ensure that reproductive decisions are well informed with balanced and up-to-date information.
Conclusion
Authors: Knight Amber , Miller Joshua
Published: April 2023

This concluding chapter analyses the Covid-19 pandemic and how it exposed and accelerated problems that we have identified throughout the book. In the starkest terms, the pandemic revealed the dangers of congregate care settings, the shortcomings of the privatization of care, and the depths of ableist attitudes. Prospective parents weighing their options following a positive fetal diagnosis of Down syndrome are doing so in a tumultuous time that has been particularly harrowing for people with disabilities and their families. Despite persistent challenges, we remain hopeful that the crisis can jolt Americans into taking disability rights seriously in an interconnected world. The groundswell of momentum among social justice organizations, coupled with renewed calls for structural change in the halls of power, gives us reason to hope that we can rebuild a more just society where the choice to bring a child with Down syndrome into the world is respected and supported.
The British Model of Capitalism and the Politics of Growth
Authors: Clift Ben
Published: April 2023

Focusing on Britain, this chapter delves into the politics of economic growth—a perennial question of political economy that is often discussed in the technocratic governance sphere in dry, technical, and depoliticizing terms. The chapter demonstrates how different views about the most desirable model of capitalism, including about the preferred mode of state intervention in the economy, underpin economic growth debates and imply their inherently political character. Comparative political economy debates about growth models and varieties of capitalism thus nourish and shape the politics of growth. Outlining competing constructions of economic reason, the chapter compares and contrasts four different theories of economic growth—neoclassical, Schumpeterian, Neo-Keynesian and ‘new’ growth theory approaches—and explores their relationship with stakeholder and shareholder models of capitalism. Charting the development and idiosyncrasies of a British ‘Anglo-Liberal’ financed-based growth model, it asks questions about the efficiency, stability, and coherence of growth models. It further places the political economy of UK capitalism in the context of the world economy, and considers how the politics of growth connects with deep-rooted anxieties about Britain’s place in the world. It considers how these anxieties play out in relation to Britain’s place in Europe, competing constructions of free trade, and the politics of Brexit. Previously dominant understandings of Britian’s place within liberal world order have been challenged in recent years by the Brexit vote, which called for the nostalgic renewal of an economically mighty ‘Global Britain’, but led the Office for Budget Responsibility to significantly downgrade the nation’s economic prospects.
COVID Changes Everything
Authors: Clift Ben
Published: April 2023

This chapter explores how the 2020 outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic radically shifted the parameters of ‘sound’ economic policy, and grappled with the limits of economic forecasting in the face of radical uncertainty. Situating the pandemic within Britain’s broader recent history of intersecting economic shocks—including the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and Brexit—the chapter uncovers how sustained crisis and uncertainty have caused the Office for Budget Responsibility to significantly rethink how it evaluates, models, and forecasts the UK economy. While the GFC raised questions about the potential stabilizing role of active fiscal policy, the pandemic consolidated the case in favour of large-scale state intervention, designed to stave off much worse economic outcomes. Amid COVID, the OBR eschewed assumptions of smooth cyclical adjustments in preference for economic models that gave great weight to potentially non-linear dynamics such as deep slumps, economic ‘scarring’, negative spirals, and ‘doom loops’, and the necessity of economic policy responses to them. This paved the way for the OBR’s more positive evaluation of the ‘battlefield medicine’ of the government’s unprecedented bold and fiscally activist COVID responses and interventions. Showing how COVID shifted the tectonic plates of fiscal rectitude and responsibility, the chapter illustrates how economic thinking and forecasting practices are buffeted—and potentially transformed—by historical conjuncture, crisis, and unexpected events. The changing politics of post-COVID UK fiscal rectitude are indicated by the OBR’s rethinking of fiscal space, and its views on the economy’s equilibrating properties in what might be a more crisis-prone ‘new normal’.
Wind of Change? Dioscorus and the See of St Mark
Authors: Menze Volker L.
Published: April 2023

When Cyril died, also the rule of the Cyrillian family clan in the Church of Alexandria ended, as already Cyril’s uncle Theophilus (385–412) had been patriarch of Alexandria. Cyril’s nephew Athanasius wanted to continue the family tradition, but the majority of clerics voted for the archdeacon Dioscorus as Cyril’s successor. The chapter discusses the hierarchy within the church chapter, particularly the role of the archdeacon. As archdeacon Dioscorus was a trusted senior cleric, and the majority of Alexandrian clergy hoped that Dioscorus would improve the financial governance of the chapter which suffered from the embezzlement committed by the Cyrillian family clan. Not much is known of Dioscorus’ tenure before 448, but one of his letters to archimandrite Shenoute of Atripe shows that the patriarch was fighting Origenism. Overall, Dioscorus appears to have been a popular bishop in Alexandria and within Egypt. The election of Dioscorus against the Cyrillian party might also have given the dyophysite near eastern bishops hope for a wind of change in Alexandria’s Christological politics. Dioscorus, however, proved to be a faithful theological disciple of his predecessor Cyril.
Ethics of Selective Restriction of Liberty in a Pandemic
Authors: Savulescu Julian
Published: April 2023

Liberty-restricting measures are basic measures in combatting any pandemic. But whose liberty should be restricted? One standard response in public health ethics is to appeal to the “least restrictive alternative” necessary to achieve a public health goal. But in practice greater restriction of liberty can lead to greater control of the pandemic and save more lives, though with increasing burdens to others. Liberty restriction is thus a question of the distribution of benefits and burdens in a population, a question of distributive justice. This chapter argues that in some pandemics, such as COVID-19, it may be a more proportionate restriction of liberty to restrict the liberty of certain groups rather than the population as a whole. Two arguments were given in the COVID-19 pandemic for liberty restriction: protection of the vulnerable, and protection of the health service. These are, however, more fundamentally issues about distributive justice. The chapter explores how several approaches to distributive justice can support the differential restriction of liberty. In addition, it argues that the commonly accepted justification for liberty restrictions (that liberty restrictions may be justified to prevent direct harm to others) can be overly simplistic, as illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic; that where risk groups are more likely to utilize limited health resources, they pose an indirect threat to others that warrants coercion; and that there should be a side-constraint on justice of non-maleficence. The chapter addresses the issue of whether selective restriction of liberty constitutes unjust discrimination and proposes an algorithm for making decisions.
Introduction to the Digital Economy Kit
Authors: Ndulu Benno , Stuart Elizabeth , Dercon Stefan , Knaack Peter
Published: April 2023

This chapter provides background on the Digital Economy Kit, sets out the impetus for the project, summarizes the theoretical framework and methodology, and outlines the structure for the book as a whole. The introduction demonstrates how digital transformation is affecting emerging economies, changing how goods and services are produced, consumed, and exchanged. It describes government efforts to encourage, innovate, and regulate these activities, and how new technologies might affect the broader nature of ‘development’. This chapter briefly introduces the design and process of the Digital Economy Kit, the partner countries in which it was trialled, and the criteria for their inclusion. It then describes the book’s intended audience and goals, what lessons can be drawn from the pilots, and caveats to keep in mind. Next, it outlines the political economy theoretical framework through which these lessons are interpreted, and reviews the structure of the subsequent chapters.
Seizing the opportunity for digital reform
Authors: Ndulu Benno , Stuart Elizabeth , Dercon Stefan , Knaack Peter
Published: April 2023

This chapter develops a political economy framework that understands digital transformation as an instance of reform. It identifies three conceptual approaches that help policymakers understand the conditions under which digital reform is likely to succeed or fail: these are bureaucratic politics, special interest groups, and the nature of the elite bargain. And it shows how these three approaches resonate with the design of the Kit and the theory of change embedded in it. Based on in-country experience, the chapter then discusses the three preconditions mentioned above, and it shows how the Oxford team together with implementing partners aimed to identify those preconditions in potential partner countries. In one or two countries we possibly misread the runes and were over-optimistic in deciding to work there.
Assessment
Authors: Ndulu Benno , Stuart Elizabeth , Dercon Stefan , Knaack Peter
Published: April 2023

This chapter critically evaluates the first stage of the Digital Economy Kit, the assessment phase. It opens with an assessment of diagnostics themselves: their past use in development has been chequered. It makes the case that a sensible diagnostic should not just identify some abstract need but instead be clear about what investments and other actions should be taken to unlock the next stage of digital potential. It explains the significance of the Kit’s design: why infrastructure, people, finance, and policy and regulation are the key pillars in which a minimum level of implementation is a prerequisite for economy-wide digital transformation. It goes on to assess three related challenges this phase encountered in actuality in the seven countries: poor quality quantitative data; absence of such data in the first place; and where it does exist, their contested nature.
Multi-stakeholder dialogue
Authors: Ndulu Benno , Stuart Elizabeth , Dercon Stefan , Knaack Peter
Published: April 2023

This chapter discusses the Digital Economy Kit’s multi-stakeholder dialogue phase. It sets out why this was deemed to be so important: along with the government champion and steering committee, participants would form a loose coalition for sustained change, vital once the Oxford team had left. The chapter compares the theoretical design (the multi-stakeholder groups would hold the difficult conversations, rehearsing and resolving the tensions or trade-offs) with the expediencies of a relatively short process in practice. The chapter then discusses how this played out, with successes, shortcomings, and lessons learned for future efforts in digital transformation in other countries and for government reform initiatives more broadly.
Strategy primer
Authors: Ndulu Benno , Stuart Elizabeth , Dercon Stefan , Knaack Peter
Published: April 2023

This chapter explains the theory and reality of the Digital Economy Kit’s final stage, the development of the strategy primer. It argues that outsider-led processes should not deliver recommendations, but rather should suggest priority actions or areas that can be properly debated and taken up into policy and strategy by the appropriate domestic process. Otherwise, this stage at best bypasses and at worst undermines domestic ownership and policy processes. This was a complex phase of the Kit which entailed boiling down an extensive enquiry into an implementable list and getting the balance right between incorporating pre-existing priorities and letting the Kit process determine them. The chapter then explains what was needed beyond a strategy primer for its actions to take root.
Herbert’s Eucharist
Authors: Ross Shaun
Published: April 2023

This chapter examines how a Calvinist understanding of the eucharist provides George Herbert with a model for valuing human agency and poetic creativity. Through an extended examination of The Temple, it shows that Herbert understands the eucharist as a repeated sacrifice of thanksgiving, rather than a propitiatory sacrifice, and that he sees poetry as an analogous form of gratitude. It also identifies how the eucharist shapes three key features of Herbert’s poetry: its tendency to return to the same words, images, and themes; its creation of a unique poetic persona; and its careful attention to the aural and visual aspects of poetic language. These features of Herbert’s poetics correspond with three related ways the Protestant eucharist emphasizes the many over the one: its repeatability, its capacity to make God intimately known to each communicant, and its treatment of the elements as supplemental to the presence they signify.
Donne’s Communions
Authors: Ross Shaun
Published: April 2023

This chapter traces two different eucharistic modes or attitudes apparent in John Donne’s writing: one mode that figures poetic language as a way to guard the poet’s subjective identity, and another mode interested in language as a conduit for connection between self and other. This chapter relies on Donne’s explications of the eucharist in his sermons to argue that the second of these two sacramental modes is ultimately more important to Donne, because it reads the eucharist as defined by an essential doubleness, that is, by its insistence on the presence of two things at once. To make this argument, this chapter attends closely to three pairs or dyads that are the object of recurrent consideration in Donne’s poetry and prose: sex and love, soul and body, and author and text.
Gracious Forgiveness
Authors: Mihut Cristian F.
Published: April 2023

Divine forgiveness is expressed in biblical and liturgical contexts through a variety of metaphors—canceling debts, covering stains, forgoing or stopping litigation, forgetting iniquities, and more. This study retrieves a theologically paradigmatic, liturgically deep, and symbolically evocative image of divine forgiveness that has received little attention: bearing burdens. A central argument of the book articulates a divine disposition to forgive starting from this metaphor. Embedded in a larger covenantal-relational framework where sin is a cosmic sickness, humans are targets of divine healing, and divine transcendence is expressed through inexhaustible gracious commitments to redress brokenness, divine forgivingness finds its most lucid, tangible, and full expression in the life and work of Jesus Christ. In the person of Jesus Christ, we see most clearly how a gracious God is committed to separating sinners from their sin, and how God heals people by absorbing into God’s own being the consequences of their offense. A second main argument of the book is that sin-bearing Christological forgivingness has ethical and relational ramifications. The study articulates a human disposition to forgive—forgivingness—that involves both a certain conception of one’s participation in Christ and a certain formation of one’s sensibility. Entrenching forgivingness depends at once on developing gracious, hopeful, and merciful dispositions, but also on seeing oneself as a continuant of God’s cosmic story of redressing brokenness. The study concludes with a defense of the surprising claim that curative forgivingness is compatible with apt anger, and even recommended to people living under oppression.
Christ and Healing with Goats
Authors: Mihut Cristian F.
Published: April 2023

Chapter 3 focuses on the nature and work of Christ. Key parts of the NT look to Jesus as the ultimate continuant of God’s drama of bearing burdens and healing sinners. As the quintessential divine agent, Christ keeps loyalty with Israel and beyond, continuing God’s healing work by embodying divine presence among blighted persons and by enacting and completing the scapegoating ritual of Yom Kippur. Christological forgiveness seamlessly fulfills both divine commitments of gracious forgivingness: on the one hand a new humanity, separate from the sin-sickness, is reworked from within, as it were, in Christ’s own humanity; on the other, as God’s unique representative, Christ absorbs into his being humanity’s sin-sickness, without passing on the contagion. Embodying God’s graciousness, completing temple-related rituals, and acting as a double-representative, Christ’s actions and dispositions also paint for believers an ambitious normative ideal for responding to evil. The chapter traces two theological ramifications. The first is an expression of the doctrine of the Incarnation. In Christ, God offers forgiveness through embodied immersion in the sin-stricken environments and histories of sinners. Contrasting the mindreading account of sin-bearing, it proposes a ritualistic, representative, recapitulationist, and physically immersive interpretation. The second theological implication sketches a framework for participating in Christ’s work of forgiveness through incorporation into divine agency. Just as God incorporates God’s agency into humanity through the Hebrew sacrificial system, we are incorporated into the agency of God when we lovingly immerse our imagination into the grace-filled narratives of Christ’s actions.
Introduction
Authors: Little Katherine C.
Published: April 2023

Renaissance humanists, such as Thomas More and Erasmus of Rotterdam, rediscovered and embraced the classical legacy, conferring a new and heightened status on good books, or bonae litterae. The value of these good books was thought to lie not only in their content, their wisdom and eloquence, but also in their effect on Christian readers, their usefulness in instructing them in morality: right and wrong behavior, thoughts, and feelings. To highlight the moral interests of humanism is to see this literary and cultural movement less as a rupture with the medieval past and more as a continuing conversation and shift in emphasis about the value of writing: its efficacy in shaping readers.
The New, the Medieval, and the Renaissance
Authors: Little Katherine C.
Published: April 2023

Renaissance humanism has long been understood as offering a new, independent, even secular idea of literature, a valuing of literature on its own terms for its eloquence and wisdom. A review of medieval and humanist approaches to the classical legacy, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Roger Ascham, indicates that the novelty of humanism is not exactly where it has been thought to be. Humanists certainly theorized literature anew, generating a more coherent idea than that held by their medieval counterparts. At the same time, however, their confidence was rooted in a certainty about moral usefulness that earlier, medieval authors did not share.
Humanism and the Morality Play
Authors: Little Katherine C.
Published: April 2023

The popularity of the morality play genre belongs to the first half of the sixteenth century, and these plays thus coincide with and offer insight into the flourishing of humanism. Two sixteenth-century plays—Everyman, which is commonly and incorrectly identified as medieval, and Mundus et Infans—demonstrate not only that the morality play is a humanist not a medieval genre but also that morality is precisely what is new about it. Both plays demonstrate a new text-based, humanist perspective on morality: that right and wrong can be learned from books.
The Uses of Good Literature
Authors: Little Katherine C.
Published: April 2023

In revaluing the classical legacy for their contemporary readership, humanists discovered the independence of these texts from Christianity, even their secularism. That independence could, at times, become oppositional, a means of limiting and containing Christian morality, as apparent in Sir Thomas Elyot’s Boke of the Governour. This influential educational treatise attempts to train its readers in right and wrong behavior, along the lines of Erasmus’s work. Elyot’s Erasmianism is not, however, a happy harmony of classical and Christian but responds instead to a particularly fraught historical moment: fears about the social and political effects of the Reformation. Elyot uses pagan, classical texts to redefine Christian behavior, removing the socially radical possibilities that can be found in conventional teachings on charity and patience.
Edmund Spenser’s Contemptus Mundi
Authors: Little Katherine C.
Published: April 2023

The Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser struggled with the idea of good books, or literature, that he inherited from humanism, and in this way he resembles his contemporaries Robert Greene and George Gascoigne. And yet his exploration of the moral value of writing is more hopeful. In his poetry collection, The Complaints (1591), Spenser uses Chaucer both to critique and to remedy the humanist project. First, he portrays the deleterious effect of humanist imitation, its emotional attachment to the past, and then he imagines literature working morally again, as a Christian, social corrective. As is fitting for the most Chaucerian of the Elizabethans, Spenser approaches literary inventiveness as inextricably tied to moral questions, and this tie inspires him as much as it causes him concern.
Afterword
Authors: Little Katherine C.
Published: April 2023

Humanism invented an idea of literature that was dependent on morality, on the goodness and greatness of books, their capacity to shape readers in right and wrong. This idea persists both in the American university and in more general discussions of education. The debates over the canon, the great books, in the late twentieth-century were morally charged, because both defenders and attackers understood reading as shaping students in morality, in what to think and feel and in how to act. The twenty-first century crisis of the humanities at American universities has once again raised the question of moral value.
Introduction
Authors: McGlynn Margaret
Published: April 2023

This chapter sets out the overall argument for the book: that common lawyers used benefit of clergy and sanctuary as the building blocks for an intentional reform of the criminal justice system in the early Tudor period. It also reviews how benefit of clergy and sanctuary are currently understood in the historiography. Finally, it describes the sources upon which this new argument is built and outlines the structure of the book.
Benefit of Clergy in the Reign of Henry VII
Authors: McGlynn Margaret
Published: April 2023

The main argument of the book begins with a statute of 1490 which was the first explicit assertion of royal authority over any form of benefit of clergy, and which extended that right to literate lay men. This statute marks the beginning of Henry VII’s conscious re-purposing of the clerical right for much more secular purposes. Though the evidence is patchy, it points to a greater engagement with the workings of benefit of clergy on the part of the secular courts after 1490, one which was further intensified and refined after 1495, and which forced the lawyers to think more carefully about how benefit of clergy could be used and how it interacted with other forms of mitigation such as turning approver and claiming sanctuary. Across the reign, claims of clergy on the part of lay men vastly outnumbered claims made by clerics, and they rose in the later part of the reign as lay men of middling status found their way into a penal system managed and funded by the Church, but largely, and increasingly, controlled by the common lawyers.
Sanctuary in the Reign of Henry VII
Authors: McGlynn Margaret
Published: April 2023

This chapter opens with an analysis of Stafford’s Case, the most important sanctuary case of Henry VII’s reign, and one that historians have argued marked the beginning of the end of sanctuary. Having contextualized the case carefully, the rest of the chapter will argue that for less-exalted criminals and less-fraught crimes, sanctuary continued to be a vital and flexible part of the legal system through the end of the century and into the next. Not all sanctuaries were equal, and the chartered sanctuaries, unchartered religious houses, and parish churches could all attract different clienteles and play quite different roles for accused felons. There were as many different outcomes to sanctuary claims as there were varieties of sanctuary-seekers, and this was a big part of its value to the system.
Benefit of Clergy 1509–1529
Authors: McGlynn Margaret
Published: April 2023

The early years of Henry VIII’s reign saw a tussle for control of both the political narrative and the practical working of benefit of clergy. The historiography of this period is dominated by a statute passed in 1512, which limited the crimes for which clergy could be claimed, and Standish’s Case, which seems to suggest that benefit of clergy was under siege. This chapter examines how the justices set out to respond to the concerns about benefit of clergy reflected in the 1512 statute and in Standish’s Case by managing the privilege more actively. In the years around 1520 they set out to track criminous clerks more effectively in order to curtail the worst of the traditional abuses of the system: successful claims by repeat offenders, bigamists, and failed abjurers. At the same time, they balanced this strictness by exploring ways to maintain and improve their ability to provide effective mitigation. By the end of that decade the number of men claiming benefit of clergy had increased, while fewer hardened criminals were using it to avoid execution.
Perpetuating Advantage
Authors: Goodin Robert E.
Published: April 2023

Injustices are, in the first instance, brute acts of identifiable individuals. But they are typically perpetuated, more subtly, through seemingly innocent workings of innocuous social structures. Critics of structural injustice are quick to call out that ruse. They say much about the sites where such structural injustice resides without saying much, as yet, about how exactly structural injustice actually works. By what specific mechanisms are unfair advantages and disadvantages perpetuated? What, specifically, can we do to interrupt them? That is the focus of this book. In it, Goodin identifies several fundamental mechanisms of structural injustice: social position, networks, language, social expectations and norms, reputation, and organization. Goodin’s discussion is deeply informed by a wide range of social sciences, mined with a philosopher’s sharp eye to what matters and lucidly explained with a deft turn of phrase. Having exposed each of those specific mechanisms of structural injustice, Goodin proceeds to explore what they all have in common. The underlying drivers, he shows, are a combination of scale effects and attention scarcities. That combination limits—but also informs—what can reasonably be done to overcome the various, nefarious mechanisms that perpetuate unfair social advantage and disadvantage.
Introduction
Authors: Goodin Robert E.
Published: April 2023

Chapter 1 sets the parameters of the book. While its topic is structural injustice, the book is more concerned with the mechanisms by which that occurs than it is with defining what structural injustice is or who, at some high level of generality, bears responsibility for overcoming it. Both of those issues are skirted by focusing, instead, on mechanisms by which advantage and disadvantage are perpetuated. The issue of structure versus agency is dismissed as an illusion, on the grounds there is almost always some human agency at work behind or within any social structure. Two fundamentally different types of advantage—comparative and absolute—are distinguished, the former being of particular interest in this book. A preliminary distinction is drawn between two modes of perpetuation of advantage: ‘flypaper’ (advantage is sticky) and ‘bottlenecks’ (access to advantage is behind gates through which only a few can pass). The emphasis of the book on guiding reform rather than allocating blame is also explained.
Position Confers Advantage
Authors: Goodin Robert E.
Published: April 2023

This chapter commences the book’s cataloguing of specific mechanisms for perpetuating advantage. The focus of this chapter is upon positional advantage. Such advantage might be grounded on any of four types of social position: in a status hierarchy; in an institutional hierarchy; in a naked power hierarchy; or in a formally organized competitive hierarchy. Any of those afford a competitive advantage to those in such a position over those lower down in the hierarchy or not in it at all. If different positional hierarchies constitute genuinely ‘separate spheres’ that are wholly independent of one another, it might be possible—although it is probably unlikely, and in any case it is far from certain—for people’s positional advantages to cancel one another out so that a pattern of broad overall equality prevails. Conversely, and more likely, if some positional goods are ‘nearly universal means’ to any ends, then people who enjoy advantage in those respects will enjoy robust positional advantage over others.
Network Confers Advantage
Authors: Goodin Robert E.
Published: April 2023

Networks connect people for purposes of the exchange of valued resources (especially information, but not only that). People gain advantage firstly by being in such a network at all (more advantage the more extensive the network is and the more valued the resources that it conveys) and secondly by being centrally placed within such a network. The tendency of people to form networks with people similar to themselves—based in part on having better information about, and more trust in, such people—tends to perpetuate, reinforce, and expand both advantage and disadvantage. Insofar as people’s networks help them find jobs, that might explain inequalities in the labour market. Insofar as people’s networks help them find rich brides, that might explain why sons and grandsons of ex-slave owners in the American South ended up as wealthy as before so quickly after the emancipation of their slaves. Finally, ‘network externalities’—the tendency of a network to be more advantageous to people the more others there are in it—mean that more people will be attracted to join already large networks, further advantaging those who are already advantaged by belonging to those large networks.
Reputation Confers Advantage
Authors: Goodin Robert E.
Published: April 2023

Reputation is a special sort of expectation, based on what the person harbouring the expectation takes to be ‘common knowledge’ about some other person or thing. Unlike a stereotype, a reputation is specific to a particular person or thing. Reputation is another source of advantage, and insofar as reputations are (deservedly or not) ‘sticky’ that advantage is perpetuated over time. Reputations might be of various types: for possessing power; for holding status positions; for enjoying network advantage; or for reliability and trustworthiness. The latter sort of reputational advantage in particular can be exacerbated, insofar as people (perfectly rationally) construct their advantage-conferring networks out of those whom they can trust, excluding from them persons they cannot (or merely do not know whether they can) trust.
Interrupting Advantage
Authors: Goodin Robert E.
Published: April 2023

This concluding chapter considers what might be done to interrupt rather than perpetuate advantage and disadvantage. The standard prescription is to ‘disrupt’ the injustice-perpetuating structures. That is fine so far as it goes, but it leaves the question ‘then what?’—which is the focus of this chapter. Two broad types of strategies are considered. The first amounts to head-on attacking the mechanisms perpetuating advantage and disadvantage; destroying them altogether, reducing the need for them or reducing the differential advantages that they confer. While each of those strategies might work in certain situations, more typically they will prove either altogether impossible or come at an unacceptable social cost (given the benefits of scale and of conserving on scarce time and attention that the mechanisms in question confer). The second set of strategies is more purely ameliorative: siphon off the benefits that the mechanisms confer upon the already advantaged and transfer them to those not so advantaged; regulate the processes by which the mechanisms confer undue advantage upon some rather than others; or provide alternative mechanisms that would benefit those not advantaged by the ordinary ones. There is more scope for those sorts of strategies to succeed, albeit in their more limited ways, in restricting the social structural perpetuation of advantage and disadvantage.
Anderson and Goldman on Identifying Experts
Authors: McKenna Robin
Published: April 2023

This chapter compares two approaches to the problem of how I, as a layperson, can choose between the conflicting claims made by rival experts. The first has been proposed by Alvin Goldman; the second by Elizabeth Anderson. The chapter argues that Anderson’s approach to the problem of identifying experts is preferable to Goldman’s because it is less ideal. Indeed, it is a good example of non-ideal institutional epistemology. This chapter therefore tackles the problem of identifying experts in an indirect fashion, by contrasting two approaches to the problem. The indirect approach is appropriate because the chapter has two distinct aims. The first is to argue for a non-ideal institutional approach to the problem of identifying experts. The second is to illustrate the contrast between ideal and non-ideal epistemology via a detailed case study.
Intellectual Autonomy
Authors: McKenna Robin
Published: April 2023

This chapter argues that intellectual autonomy is not just an epistemic ideal or goal that many of us frequently and predictably fall short of but also an epistemic goal that often frustrates our other epistemic goals. In striving to be intellectually autonomous, we run the risk of not achieving our other—usually more valuable—epistemic goals. This has important implications for the debate about epistemic paternalism. In this debate, intellectual autonomy functions as an ideal, in that it puts strict limits on the extent to and ways in which we can interfere with the inquiries of others. But, if we sometimes do better not to try and preserve intellectual autonomy, objections against epistemic paternalism lose much of their force.
A new dataset mapping the content of coalition agreements
Authors: Klüver Heike , Bäck Hanna , Krauss Svenja
Published: April 2023

Chapter 3 focuses on describing the extensive COALITIONAGREE dataset on the content of coalition agreements that has been newly compiled for this book. The COALITIONAGREE dataset covers as many as 229 coalition agreements that have been negotiated by 189 parties between 1945 and 2015 in 24 West and East European countries. The COALITIONAGREE Dataset is not only much more comprehensive than previous dataset as the authors cover more cabinets, countries, and a longer time period, but most importantly, they also provide the first content analysis that allows for studying which policies are settled in coalition agreements. The dataset is based on a comprehensive content analysis of coalition treaties that draws on human coders to identify and measure the content of coalition agreements. This chapter explains in detail how the coalition agreements were collected and how their content was coded.
Preference configuration and coalition agreements
Authors: Klüver Heike , Bäck Hanna , Krauss Svenja
Published: April 2023

Chapter 5 starts with an assessment of how the preference configuration in coalition governments influences the content of coalition agreements. It is argued that ideological conflict in coalition cabinets positively affects issue attention as coalition parties have stronger incentives to negotiate a detailed policy agenda that constrains their coalition partners when intra-cabinet conflict is high. However, it is posited that this effect is conditioned by preference tangentiality and the overall salience of policy issues among cabinet partners as the incentives to engage in lengthy negotiations about a policy compromise increase with the salience of an issue but decrease as tangentiality rises. The results presented in this chapter support this argument.
Introduction: Sugar and Energy
Authors: Eaglin Jennifer
Published: April 2023

Beginning with the present-day importance of alternative energy options due to climate change, this chapter problematizes the Brazilian ethanol industry. Connected to Brazil’s long history of sugar production, the industry’s development links agricultural, industrial, developmental, environmental, social, and political histories with nationalist interests in a domestic non-petroleum fuel option. Focused on Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, the chapter explores the central human and environmental actors involved in the development of Proálcool and the region’s ascendance as the largest ethanol-producing region in the country by the late twentieth century. By exploring the stakes of Brazilian ethanol’s historical development, this chapter introduces questions about the nature of development in Brazil, the costs associated with the non-fossil fuel energy’s expansion, and the the possibilities of moving beyond oil for fuel in the present day.
Lakes of Sacrifice
Authors: Eaglin Jennifer
Published: April 2023

This chapter examines the broader environmental devastation that the ethanol industry’s expansion brought on rural waterways with the growth of the National Ethanol Program (Proálcool). Sugar and ethanol producers liberally dumped the liquid byproduct of ethanol distillation, vinasse, in waterways for decades before the program’s creation with a detrimental impact on public health outcomes in sugar producing regions. Regulation of vinasse dumping slowly expanded as constituents of these regions demanded government intervention to slow private industry’s destruction of local flora and fauna. Despite legislation, the scale of the ethanol program drove an exponential increase in vinasse production, which increased public doubt about the program’s long-term viability in the 1980s.
Proálcool, Caneworkers, and the Guariba Strikes of 1984
Authors: Eaglin Jennifer
Published: April 2023

This chapter focuses on the temporary rural workers known as boias-frias, In May 1984, workers went on strike in Guariba, a sugar-producing hub within Ribeirão Preto, to demand better working conditions and compensation. Their actions briefly brought ethanol production in the dominant region to a halt and eventually led to the country’s first collective bargaining agreement between rural workers and sugar and ethanol mill owners. Their mobilization amplified growing dissent about Proálcool under the military dictatorship. The strikes drew attention to exploitative labor policies that drove the program’s growth, ultimately contributing to a shift in public opinion on the program by the late 1980s.
Epilogue
Authors: Eaglin Jennifer
Published: April 2023

The Epilogue traces the fifteen years after Brazilian ethanol’s ascendance as a global fuel source in 2003. Ethanol’s lower carbon emissions than gasoline and competitive pricing with high cost petroleum of the mid-2000s promoted global enthusiasm for the alternative fuel as a potential global clean energy option. Instead the ethanol market endured a bust cycle that mirrored ethanol’s collapse in the late 1980s and petroleum’s historical boom-bust cycles. Comparing these cyclical turns in both fuel markets challenges assumptions about alternative energy industries and provides insight into what a transition to a carbon-free, green energy economy might look like in the near future.
A Short Modern History of China’s Soft and Sharp Power Approaches
Authors: Kurlantzick Joshua
Published: April 2023

This chapter explores how and why China wielded soft and sharp power in the 1990s and early 2000s, when it was weaker but it was beginning to come out of its shell diplomatically, and project power in Asia and, to some extent, in other parts of the world. (The author wrote a book about Chinese soft power in this period, entitled Charm Offensive.) The chapter examines the goals of this earlier soft, and to some extent sharp, power, offensives, and talks about how limited they were compared to today’s efforts. It also discusses how these offensives enjoyed some success, due to the way in which China wielded soft power.
Opportunities
Authors: Kurlantzick Joshua
Published: April 2023

Some of the motivations for China’s expanded soft and sharp power campaigns today were the limits of its earlier charm offensive, the seismic changes in Chinese domestic politics during the era of Xi Jinping, the growing appeal of China’s developmental model amidst democracies’ domestic problems, and the simple fact that China is becoming a major global power—economically, strategically, and diplomatically. As a more dominant power, Beijing needs a bigger set of tools to protect and expand its strategic and economic reach, across a far broader array of regions, and to mitigate the growing anger in some countries over China’s more assertive diplomacy and foreign policy choices. But a major factor behind this expanded campaign as well was opportunity—particularly, the opportunity to wield sharp power. Many democracies seemed quite vulnerable to sharp power. And by the 2010s, China had greater resources to deploy on sharp power tactics that already had begun to show promise, and was learning from Russia’s sharp power examples that showed weaknesses in other countries to sharp power. Australia and New Zealand were some of the first to face serious Chinese influence in their political systems and media.
Controlling the Pipes
Authors: Kurlantzick Joshua
Published: April 2023

Even as China attempts to use the control over media and information it has amassed, it is also working to dominate the “pipes” through which information moves and to wield influence in “old-fashioned” ways like controlling student groups, politicians, think tanks, and other organizations in foreign countries. More specifically, these pipes include the physical telecommunications networks for wireless and wired data; mobile phones and other devices that display information; tools that create the Internet of Things; tools that allow for surveillance; leading search engines, web browsers, and social media platforms; and the standards that govern the internet. This control of pipes potentially gives China enormous control over how other countries’ internets and media operate, and indeed over the global internet. In addition, China is wielding an increasingly sophisticated influence operation in many countries over students, politicians, and other centers of power.
China’s Mixed Effectiveness
Authors: Kurlantzick Joshua
Published: April 2023

Despite significant media coverage suggesting Beijing is enjoying great success in its global media and information expansion and its covert influence tactics in other countries, in reality its success has been mixed. This mixed success is important for policymakers in other states to keep in mind. Beijing’s efforts to use influence over media and information for political gains have not always proven a stirring success; Beijing is actually falling behind in its influence and information approaches now because it has alienated so many countries with its aggressive diplomacy, its linkage with Russia, its increasing military assertiveness regarding Taiwan, and its own self-imposed isolation from the world. Indeed, even before Beijing alienated so many countries in 2021 and 2022, China’s attempts to use its state media, and its sharp control of media outlets, for tangible gains had run into major roadblocks, although it is still enjoying some degree of greater success with its covert, old-fashioned influence tactics.
Arranging Marriage, Negotiating Dharma
Authors: Ortegren Jennifer D.
Published: April 2023

This chapter introduces the Mali family, whose socioeconomic and familial dynamics epitomize the lifestyles of the emerging middle classes. It focuses on shifts in the attitudes and practices surrounding the marriage of the eldest daughter, Kavita, and her experiences and narratives of desire related to education, marriage, and working outside of the home. As practices surrounding these issues include negotiations of caste, life stage, and gendered dharma—practices that are rapidly changing to conform to middle-class sensibilities—this chapter illustrates how the intersections of class and dharma “work” in the everyday lives of upwardly mobile Hindu women. Kavita’s appeals to her middle-class status to justify emerging aspirations and create a life for herself as a middle-class woman, wife, and mother that is different than her own mother’s life demonstrate how class identity functions to enable young women to expand traditional boundaries of dharma.