bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“On One Path or the Other”
Authors: Cameron Nigel M. de S.
Published: September 2006

The series of policy positions of the US administration in the opening years of the “biotech century” in respect to cloning, embryonic stem cell research, and the patenting of human embryos offers a case study in the development of public policy that, though it has been developed in the context of secular argument, reflects distinctive concerns of Christian theology. Through several events (including the development of mammalian cloning by somatic cell nuclear transfer, the pursuit by Bill Clinton's administration of a workaround for congressional bans on embryo research, the UN Franco-German cloning initiative, and concerns over intellectual property claims on human nature), the Bush administration has confronted a series of policy decisions affecting the ethical-legal framework for biotechnology. Though there has been little explicitly Christian reflection within the bioethics community, Christians together with other thinkers have recognized that these questions could determine the scope and course of developments in biotechnology.
Apples and Oranges
Authors: Glicksman Gail Gaisin , Glicksman Allen
Published: September 2006

In recent years a new approach to the study of religion in the social sciences has emerged. It differs from the classical approach in four important ways. First, it treats all specific religious traditions as subsets or specific expressions of some underlying domain that is universal across all groups. Second this new approach treats religion as generally beneficent, and in this way it differs from both those theoreticians like Durkheim and Weber, who saw a more complex relationship between religion and society, and those such as Marx and Freud, who generally took a negative view of the effect of religion. Third, adherents of this new approach claim to be able to identify a therapeutic effect of religion on the physical and mental health of individuals, treating religion as a “health behavior”. This chapter asks whether this new approach accomplishes the goals of its proponents. It examines the Jewish identities felt by American Jews sixty-five years of age and older as a test case.
The Heart of the Matter
Authors: Guinn David E.
Published: September 2006

Concerns about caregivers providing religious or spiritual care arise, in large part, out of a misunderstanding about religion and spirituality and what those terms really mean. Many people treat religion and spirituality as special and unique. This chapter argues that religion and spirituality are basic human facts as inseparable from what it means to be human in the same way as our sex, our age, our ethnicity or the other social and cultural factors that caregivers routinely address. The chapter begins by offering a functionalist definition of religion and spirituality. It then examines research on the needs of patients at the end of life and suggests how these express religious and spiritual concerns. Finally, it offers guidelines as to how the caregiver may meet those needs of a patient.
Bioethical Entanglements of Race, Religion, and AIDS
Authors: Goodwin Michele
Published: September 2006

The domains of religious doctrine and practice provide ground for double bind analysis, particularly as applied to race, religion, and bioethics. In these spheres, reconciling church doctrine with social or medical practice is often challenging; the demands from each sphere are unique and sometimes irreconcilable. This chapter uses double bind theory as a framework to engage in a dialogue concerning race, religion, and bioethics. It offers a dialogue that scrutinizes conservative religious thought in what is colloquially known as the “black church” regarding the challenges of medical ethics and race.
Dark Feelings, Grim Thoughts
Authors: Solomon Robert C.
Published: September 2006

Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were the giants of 20th-century “existentialism”, although neither of them was comfortable with that title. Their famous differences aside, they shared a “phenomenological” sensibility and described personal experience in exquisite and excruciating detail and reflected on the meaning of this experience with both sensitivity and insight. That is the focus of this book: Camus and Sartre, their descriptions of personal experience, and their reflections on the meaning of this experience. They also reflected, worriedly, on the nature of reflection. The thematic problem of the book is the relationship between experience and reflection. The book explores this relationship through novels and plays, Camus’ The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall, Sartre’s Nausea and No Exit, and Sartre’s great philosophical tome, Being and Nothingness.
Camus' Myth of Sisyphus and the Meaning of Life
Authors: Solomon Robert C.
Published: September 2006

Camus’ essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, is a study of what Camus calls “the Absurd”. This chapter explores the various interpretations of that idea, including human mortality and the absurdity of repetition.
Meditations on Nausea
Authors: Solomon Robert C.
Published: September 2006

Sartre’s first novel, Nausea, is quite clearly a working out of the phenomenological insights he was developing at the time in such works as “Transcendence of the Ego” and “The Emotions”. This chapter explores the basic tenets of Sartre’s phenomenology, focusing in particular on his rejection of certain themes in his mentor, Edmund Husserl. It also spends considerable time looking at the perversity of Sartre’s central character, Roquentin, who quite clearly resembles Sartre himself at that time in his situation and his provincial circumstances.
No Way Out
Authors: Solomon Robert C.
Published: September 2006

Sartre’s No Exit is a conscientiously trite play that explores some profound truths about what Sartre (in Being and Nothingness) calls Being-for-Others. No Exit presents us with three perverse characters in Hell who are forced to spend eternity together. The play explores the nature of human relationships, how people deceive one another and deceive themselves. Sartre’s conclusion is “Hell is other people”.
In Praise of Blame
Authors: Sher George
Published: September 2006

Blame is an unpopular and neglected notion: it goes against the grain of a therapeutically oriented culture and has been far less discussed by philosophers than such related notions as responsibility and punishment. This book seeks to show that neither the opposition nor the neglect is justified. The book’s most important conclusion is that blame is inseparable from morality itself — that any considerations that justify us in accepting a set of moral principles must also call for the condemnation of those who violate the principles. Because blame has not received much sustained attention, the book works its way toward its conclusions by first raising, and then seeking to resolve, a series of conceptual and normative questions. These questions include: How are blameworthy acts related to the characters of the agents who perform them? Can agents deserve blame for their bad traits as well as their bad acts? Is blame best understood as a kind of action, a kind of belief, a kind of feeling, a combination of these elements, or something entirely different? What sort of moral concept is blameworthiness? How do blame and blameworthiness — correlative concepts — fit together? Although the book draws both on Hume’s treatment of the relation between character and blame and Strawson’s landmark discussion of the “reactive attitudes”, the theory that emerges is neither Humean nor Strawsonian. It is a new theory that seeks to do more justice than its predecessors to the indispensable role that blame plays in our moral lives.
The Structure of Blameworthy Action
Authors: Sher George
Published: September 2006

This chapter exploits the insight that emerged in the previous chapter — that a bad act may be rooted in an agent’s character without manifesting a defect in that character — to explain how an act’s badness can render an agent blameworthy. According to this explanation, the crucial fact is that the act’s bad-making features can be traced to the interplay of the very same desires, beliefs, and dispositions that also make the agent the person he is. By assigning character this reduced but still substantial role, we can preserve what is important about Hume’s account while avoiding his errors.
Blame for Traits
Authors: Sher George
Published: September 2006

The main thesis of this chapter is that agents can be blamed for their bad traits as well as for their bad acts. Because we often cannot help being the sorts of people we are, this thesis is inconsistent with the view that agents can only be blamed for what is (or once was) within their control. However, although that view is widely held, its grounding is not well understood. The chapter’s main argument is that no version of it that applies to traits (as opposed to acts) is defensible.
Women's Liberation and the Sublime
Authors: Mann Bonnie
Published: September 2006

In the 1980s, this book contends, an uncritical affirmation of anti-essentialism turned this important feminist critique into a disciplinary dogmatism that constrained and homogenized feminist thinking. Feminist work in the academy became forgetful of both women and nature, and began to exchange an engaged politics for the intensity of sublime experience in its postmodern form. This book works between the modern and postmodern notions of the sublime to show that the gendered politics and effacement of nature, central to the modern sublime, especially in Kant's account, are at the heart of the postmodern sublime as well. It turns to Lyotard's postmodern sublime to argue that this sublime is hard at work in feminist poststructuralism, especially the early texts of Judith Butler. The melting away of the extra-discursively real in these accounts tends to make feminist thinking incapable of meaningfully articulating our relations to the natural world and to one another. Yet these very relations are necessarily tied to powerful aesthetic experiences of beauty and sublimity.
Feminism and the Sublime
Authors: Mann Bonnie
Published: September 2006

This chapter focuses on the notion of the sublime, which is discussed in relation to its foil: beauty. It is argued that some of the specific ways that the experience of the sublime is gendered and racialized are to be found on both sides of the boundary between the modern and the postmodern. The chapter also considers Kantian sublime out of an interest in how the sublime functions as a mode of Euro-masculine self-constitution and how we might understand, in detail, what this means and how it works.
The Kantian Sublime
Authors: Mann Bonnie
Published: September 2006

The turn of the century was marked by a preoccupation with relationships of Otherness, both internal and external to Europe. In establishing his difference from these Others, the Euro-masculine subject also established himself. The very possibility of erecting a convincing edifice of freedom, autonomy, and sovereignty rested on what he did with these Others. Kant wrote his Observations and, more than two decades later, his “Analytic of the Sublime” in the midst of these debates. He attempted to sort through the confusions that characterized the Euro-masculine relation to Others, both as a philosopher and as one of the founders of the new field of anthropology. This chapter discusses these confusions based on two general sets of paradoxes: the paradox of space and the paradox of time. The first paradox considers these sorts of questions: where are the Others of the Euro-masculine subject in relation to him — inside or outside? What kind of space or place does this subject inhabit? Is a woman a part of a man? If so then how is it that a man is not partly a woman? How is this subject's spatial self-constitution built around a man's spatial relations to nature and women? The second paradox considers questions of time and sequence: what kind of time does this subject inhabit? What kind of time inhabits him? Where are others in this subject's time? Are racialized others that I encounter encountered in my time? How is temporal self-constitution built around temporal relations to racialized others?
The Postmodern Sublime
Authors: Mann Bonnie
Published: September 2006

This chapter focuses on the notion of the postmodern sublime. It considers Lyotard's late work to illustrate what is disturbing and what might be important in feminist appropriations of the sublime. It begins by contextualizing Lyotard's treatment of the sublime in terms of his broader project of developing a “philosophical politics” of “bearing witness to the differend.” It then looks more closely at Lyotard's reading of the Kantian sublime and at his discussion of language using the famous example of “Albert.” The chapter addresses the following questions: what happens to place in Lyotard's philosophical politics? What political possibilities are opened or closed in the process? Finally, one of Lyotard's essays on feminism, or as he terms it “women's struggles,” is discussed, which paves the way for looking at how the postmodern sublime is at work in feminist thinking in the next chapters.
The Stakes of Feminism and the Feminist Postmodern
Authors: Mann Bonnie
Published: September 2006

This chapter focuses on Judith Butler's early work in order to clarify some central stakes (or mis-takes) of feminist postmodernism. It begins by acknowledging and responding to her insistence that the term “postmodernism” is misleading and masks a “ruse of authority” that distorts rather than clarifies the issues at hand. It is argued that establishing the feminist postmodern over and against a foreclosed“essentialism” amounts to a disavowal of the realm of necessity. A dual conception of “nature” as “human nature” and the natural world is foreclosed at the moment that inaugurates the textual space in which feminist postmodernism sets to work. This disavowed realm returns on the inside of Butler's theory as a discursive “nature,” which makes constant trouble in regards to the subject's agency, the subject's freedom. It is shown that Butler's approach to the relation between extradiscursive being and speech authorizes the displacement of feminism from its foundation, but not a foundation in the unitary subject so much as a foundation in a certain set of historical projects. The return of the repressed realm of necessity (or otherwise said, the repressed relation to the earth) in Butler's early texts, its return as discursive determinacy, pushes toward exactly what Butler turns to in her later work: the theme of embodied vulnerability in relation to other persons.
Talking Back to Feminist Postmodernism
Authors: Mann Bonnie
Published: September 2006

This chapter focuses on a feminist account of the body that returns it to its flesh and blood, while taking into account the theoretical developments that turned the body into a text. Topics discussed include history notes on feminism and the body, Judith Butler's work and the textualization of the body, Butler on Merleau-Ponty, and Merleau-Ponty on the body and place.
Obscene Jesters
Authors: Snodgrass Jeffrey G.
Published: September 2006

This chapter describes Bhat relationships to the ritualized village patron-client “gift” economy found throughout northern India called jajmani. It is shown that the Bhats’ skill as bards, and their perspectives on caste relations more generally, emerge from the manner in which this social economy places value on exchanges between patrons and clients. In particular, this chapter explores Bhat understandings of virtue, and thus also of caste hierarchy, through a consideration of Bhat praise- and insult-poems which celebrate gifting and generosity. It is argued that views of caste emphasizing the importance of patronage and kingship — as opposed to purity, pollution, and priesthood — better explain Bhat relations to the Indian institution of caste.
The Enduring Power of Praise-Abuse
Authors: Snodgrass Jeffrey G.
Published: September 2006

This chapter focuses on the Bhats’ tactical narration of their religious history, and specifically the manner in which they present themselves as alternately Hindu or Muslim in order to gain employment as political propagandists for both India’s secular Congress Party and Hindu-nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (B.J.P.). The chapter also examines how Bhats “cast” traditional Rajasthan in a puppet drama sponsored by a state-run bank meant to teach Indians an ethic of saving their money and planning for the future. Bhats are not entirely serious about the claim explored throughout the book that they are the former bards of kings. Instead, claims of royal ancestry are just one tool in a repertoire of tricks that Bhats use to advance in contemporary India. Bhat speech about kings, then, is less representative of true claims to royalty and more indicative of a bardic cleverness which forms a deeper basis of Bhat identity claims in contemporary Rajasthan.
Sick Morality
Authors: Martin Mike W.
Published: September 2006

This chapter focuses on therapeutic critiques of morality. Both Freud and Nietzsche attack traditional morality as unhealthy and sick — as psychologically unrealistic in its demands to care about others, neglectful of human needs for self-affirmation, and the source of needless depression and anxiety. Both identify guilt as the culprit: society generates “the deep sickness” of guilt (bad conscience) and lessens happiness “through the heightening of the sense of guilt.”. In calling for a healthy value perspective, Freud and Nietzsche caution about the excesses of guilt and blame conventional morality, but they underestimate the positive role of guilt. Freud and Nietzsche also call for greater psychological realism in acknowledging predominant needs for self-love and self-assertion, but they fail to acknowledge that psychological realism also implies appreciating human capacities of caring for others. Their one-sided focus on the self, to the neglect of altruism and obligations, illustrates a danger in many therapeutic perspectives.
Responsibility in Community
Authors: Martin Mike W.
Published: September 2006

Critics have interpreted the therapeutic trend as a replacement of community-oriented morality with self-oriented therapeutic values such as self-esteem, self-fulfilment, and authenticity. They charge that exporting therapeutic attitudes from the clinic to the community erodes moral responsibility by fostering moral subjectivity and shallowness, lowering moral aspiration, and encouraging selfishness and a victim mentality. This chapter responds to these charges, including their application to self-help groups and moral education, and argues that the critics identify genuine dangers but exaggerate them. For the most part, the therapeutic trend integrates morality with therapy, albeit with varying degrees of success, rather than abandoning it.
Alcoholism
Authors: Martin Mike W.
Published: September 2006

This chapter presents an integrated, moral-therapeutic perspective on alcoholism. Beginning in the mid-1930s, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) invigorated the therapeutic trend by convincing health professionals and the American public that alcoholism is a disease rather than a morally bad habit. In contrast, it is argued that alcoholism is both a sickness and a morally bad habit. It is a disorder of agency that has physical, psychological, and moral dimensions. The chapter concludes that beneath the disagreements about alcoholism, there is agreement on many key points: alcoholism raises major medical and moral issues; alcoholism is not dictated by a simple biochemical abnormality; most alcoholics retain significant episodic control; most have difficulty (in varying degrees) in controlling their overall patterns of drinking and need help; drinkers have responsibility to avoid causing harm, to cooperate in solving their drinking problems, and to make amends for the harm they cause; and self-righteous blaming and destructive self-blaming are objectionable on both moral and therapeutic grounds. These conclusions provide a partial roadmap for thinking about additional forms of wrongdoing as sickness.
Healthy Love
Authors: Martin Mike W.
Published: September 2006

This chapter begins by illustrating how love can simultaneously involve sickness and immorality, using examples of jealousy, unrequited love, and sadomasochism. It then outlines a virtue-oriented conception of healthy love, illustrating how moral and therapeutic conceptions of love overlap. The chapter concludes by replying to Robert Bellah's criticisms of the therapeutic trend regarding love.
Meaningful Work
Authors: Martin Mike W.
Published: September 2006

The promise of the global economy is matched by its perils to meaningful work: increased layoffs, extended unemployment, job stress from longer working hours and demands for increased productivity, and preoccupation with money in every area of life. An integrated, moral-therapeutic perspective cannot remove these threats, but it can help us cope with them. This chapter illustrates some therapeutic contributions in dealing with moral matters concerning stress and alienation. It begins with Herman Melville's short story, “Bartleby.” It then turns to positive conceptions of mental health in thinking about meaningful work — work that combines ethics with excellence.
Community Service
Authors: Martin Mike W.
Published: September 2006

This chapter discusses how an integrated, moral-therapeutic perspective on philanthropy emphasizes the confluence of self-interest, community service, and the virtues. Although all virtues contribute to philanthropy, the chapter focuses on compassion, gratitude, hope, and justice. An integrated, moral-therapeutic perspective enables us to appreciate the confluence of morality and mental health in meaningful lives of service.
Introduction
Authors: Martin Mike W.
Published: September 2006

This introductory chapter begins by laying out the theoretical foundations of this book, namely, that (1) sound morality is healthy; (2) we are responsible for our health, mental as well as physical; and (3) moral values permeate psychotherapy and conceptions of mental health. It then considers some moral controversies, such as drugs, homosexuality, and child abuse that illustrate the cultural ambivalence about how morality and mental health are related. The integration of morality and therapy, and pragmatism and virtue ethics are discussed.
Understanding Poverty
Authors: Banerjee Abhijit Vinayak , Bénabou Roland , Mookherjee Dilip
Published: September 2006

This volume presents 28 essays on poverty by some of the leading experts in the field of economics. The book is divided into three sections, beginning with an essay about how poverty is measured. The first section is about the causes of poverty and its persistence, and the ideas range from the impact of colonialism and globalization to the problems of “excessive” population growth, corruption, and ethnic conflict. The second section is about policy: how should we fight poverty? The essays discuss issues such as how to get drug companies to produce more vaccines for the diseases of the poor, what we should and should not expect from micro-credit, what we should do about child labor, and how to design welfare policies that work better. The third section presents new ways of thinking about poverty such as the integration of psychology and economics, nonmarket institutions, and interconnections between race and economic inequality.
Colonialism, Inequality, and Long-Run Paths of Development
Authors: Engerman Stanley L. , Sokoloff Kenneth L.
Published: September 2006

This essay explores the hypothesis that extreme differences in inequality across European colonies in the Americas gave rise to systematic differences in the ways institutions evolved, and in turn, on the paths of development. European colonization altered the composition of the populations in the colonized societies. Because colonization generally meant implanting communities that were greatly advantaged over natives in terms of human capital and legal status, and because the trajectories of institutional development were sensitive to the incidence of extreme inequality that often followed, European colonial activity had long, lingering effects. Colonies in the Americas with extreme inequality, compared with those with relative equality, were systematically more likely to evolve institutions that restricted access to economic opportunities and to generate lower rates of public investment in schools and other infrastructure considered conducive to growth. These patterns of institutional development, which tend to persist over time in economic performance, may help explain why many societies that began with extreme inequality continue to suffer from the same condition.
The Kuznets Curve: Yesterday and Tomorrow
Authors: Piketty Thomas
Published: September 2006

The Kuznets curve hypothesis has been one of the most debated issues in development economics since the mid-1950s. In a nutshell, the hypothesis simply states that income inequality should follow an inverse-U shape along the development process: first rising with industrialization and then declining, as more and more workers join the high-productivity sectors of the economy. Today, the Kuznets curve is widely held to have doubled back on itself, especially in the United States, with the period of falling inequality during the first half of the 20th century being followed by a sharp reversal of the trend since the 1970s. This essay looks at this “technical change” view of inequality dynamics, whereby waves of technological innovations generated waves of inverse-U curves. It considers the inequality decline that took place in the West during the first half of the 20th century, arguing that recent historical research is rather damaging for Kuznets’s interpretation: the reasons why inequality declined in rich countries seem to be due to very specific shocks and circumstances that do not have much to do with the migration process described by Kuznets, and that are very unlikely to occur again in today’s poor countries. It takes a broader perspective on the technical change view of inequality dynamics, drawing both from historical experience and from more recent trends. It argues that this view has proven to be excessively naïve and that country-specific institutions often play a role that is at least as important as technological waves.
New Growth Approach to Poverty Alleviation
Authors: Aghion Philippe , Aghion Beatriz Armendáriz de
Published: September 2006

This essay attempts to break the divide between growth and development economics. Using the example of India over the past decades, it argues that innovation and/or productivity growth have been main engines of poverty reduction in that country. It also argues that new growth theories can shed light on this process and explain why growth and poverty reduction have not occurred in Latin America. The remainder of this essay is organized as follows. The second section summarizes what is currently known about the evolution of growth and poverty indicators in India since the 1960s. The third section provides a very brief presentation of new growth theory and of some of its main predictions. The fourth section uses the description of new growth theory to analyze the reform process in India. The fifth section shows that the 1991 reforms had unequalizing effects on productivity and profitability across industries and states. Finally, it reflects upon the contrasting experiences of Asia and Latin America with regard to productivity growth and poverty alleviation.
Globalization and All That
Authors: Banerjee Abhijit Vinayak
Published: September 2006

This essay begins with a discussion of the Samuelson-Stolper Theorem, which states that if a labor-abundant country is opened to trade with a labor-scarce country, laborers in the first country and the employers in the second will profit at the expense of the workers in the second country and the employers in the first. It then looks at the trade following World War II under the supervision of the newly created guardians of the world trading system: the World Bank, the IMF, and the GATT, as well as trade liberalization in Mexico, Latin America, and Asia. It discusses the issue of reputation: what it means to countries and how it determines what a country ends up exporting to the world.
The Global Economy and the Poor
Authors: Bardhan Pranab
Published: September 2006

This essay explores the issue of globalization, focusing on damage caused to jobs, wages, and incomes of poor people by the dislocations and competition of international trade and foreign investment, and the weakening of the ability of the state to compensate for this damage and alleviate poverty. It discusses the poor as self-employed workers, as wage workers, and as users of public services and common property resources. It argues that in the medium-to-long run, globalization need not make the poor much worse off if appropriate domestic policies and institutions are in place and appropriate coordination among the involved parties can be organized. If the institutional prerequisites can be managed, globalization opens the door for some new opportunities even for the poor.
Ethnic Diversity and Poverty Reduction
Authors: Miguel Edward
Published: September 2006

This essay begins with a discussion of the recent social science literature on the impact of ethnic, racial, and religious divisions, and then proposes a set of policies that less-developed countries should follow to help them overcome ethnic conflict. It advocates the adoption of “nation-building” policies that foster the development of a common national identity. The case of Tanzania, and the contrast of Tanzania with its East African neighbor, Kenya, is the focus of this essay. It is argued that Tanzania’s serious approach to forging a common national identity attractive across ethnic groups — which takes the form of extensive linguistic, educational, and institutional reforms — offers a model for other less-developed countries that inherited ethnic divisions in the post-independence period. An overview of empirical evidence based on original field data collection is presented, which shows that this nation-building approach has allowed ethnically diverse communities in rural Tanzania to achieve considerable success in local fund-raising for primary schools, while ethnically diverse Kenyan communities have largely failed in this task.
Redistribution toward Low Incomes in Richer Countries
Authors: Saez Emmanuel
Published: September 2006

This essay presents a critical overview of the findings of economic research on the problem of redistribution toward low incomes in developed countries. The discussion is organized as follows. The second section briefly describes the positive and empirical analysis (for which numerous good surveys are available) and focuses mostly on the normative analysis. The third section starts with a discussion of the optimal structure of cash transfer programs, then extends the analysis of optimal transfer programs along various new dimensions. The fourth section discusses how the results of the third section might be affected in situations where individuals may not be able to make the best choices for themselves. The fifth section provides a conclusion and an educated view on what should be done for redistribution toward low incomes.
Transfers and Safety Nets in Poor Countries: Revisiting the Trade-Offs and Policy Options
Authors: Ravallion Martin
Published: September 2006

This essay examines the role of targeted transfers in poor countries in the light of the new theories on the social costs of unmitigated inequalities and uninsured risks. Recognizing that the policy implications depend crucially on whether there is good empirical evidence to support the theoretical arguments, the bulk of the first half of the essay discusses the evidence. The essay then takes up a key question for policy: Can the potential for efficient redistribution be realized in practice using targeted transfers, given the constraints faced in poor countries? It is argued that there can be too much uninsured risk and inequality, when judged solely from the viewpoint of aggregate output. For example, credit market failures can mean that it is the poor who are unable to exploit new economic opportunities; the more poor people, the fewer the opportunities that get exploited, and thus the lower the rate of growth. Persistent concentrations of poverty in poor environments can also arise from market failures, given geographic externalities whereby living in a poor area is a cause of poverty. This body of theory and evidence offers a new perspective on social protection policies in poor countries, suggesting that there is scope for using these policies to compensate for the market failures that help perpetuate poverty, particularly in high-inequality settings.
Poverty Persistence and Design of Antipoverty Policies
Authors: Mookherjee Dilip
Published: September 2006

This essay argues that economists have ignored a crucial dimension of poverty: its intrinsically dynamic characteristic of being locked into a low-level trap of asset (or capability) deprivation, resulting in exclusion from social and economic life on a par with the rest of society. Long-term poverty is fundamentally self-perpetuating. Hence, poverty alleviation in the long run must address incentives for the poor to acquire capabilities and assets that will enable them (or their children) to escape poverty in the future. In the Mirrlees model, for instance, the income-earning capability of every household is exogenously given, hence the root causes of current poverty are not addressed. A dynamic extension of this framework would be needed to include investment decisions by households, which would affect the evolution of their future abilities. Such a framework more directly addresses some of the general public concerns concerning the tendency of comprehensive welfare systems to breed long-term dependence. At the same time, the argument for superiority of cash over in-kind transfers ceases to be valid, even within the conventional utilitarian framework where consumer “rationality” is not questioned.
Public Policies to Stimulate Development of Vaccines for Neglected Diseases
Authors: Kremer Michael
Published: September 2006

This essay focuses on the impact of intellectual property rights (IPRs) on low-and middle-income countries’ health care. There are two different reasons why poor countries may not have access to needed vaccines and drugs. In the case of global diseases, such as diabetes or cancer, patents may hinder the diffusion of pharmaceuticals. In the case of neglected or tropical diseases, such as malaria, tuberculosis, and leishmaniasis, the corresponding vaccines or drugs are not developed because of low profitability due to the poverty of potential customers. The important role of compulsory licensing for low- and middle-income countries is discussed.
Microinsurance: The Next Revolution?
Authors: Morduch Jonathan
Published: September 2006

This essay focuses on the design of insurance products for poor customers. Several promising innovations are described: credit life insurance, health insurance partnerships, and weather insurance. Each was created to serve populations that were previously unserved, and workable institutional solutions are emerging. The next step must be to shift from the question of what creates workable institutions to the question of how to refine designs to best serve low-income populations. In doing so, current approaches must be reassessed in order to most improve clients’ lives and to avoid doing unintended harm.
Natural Moralities
Authors: Wong David B.
Published: September 2006

To be called a relativist, especially a moral relativist, is to be condemned as someone who holds that “anything goes”. Frequently the term is part of a dichotomy: either accept relativism or accept universalism: the view that only one true morality exists. This book defends a new version of relativism that is both an alternative to, and fits between, universalism and relativism as usually defined. Pluralistic relativism does accord with one aspect of relativism as usually defined: there is no single true morality. Beyond that, it is argued that there can be a plurality of true moralities, moralities that exist across different traditions and cultures, all of which address facets of the same problem: how we are to live well together. A comparative and naturalistic approach is applied to the understanding of moralities, with discussion of a wide array of positions and texts within the Western canon as well as in Chinese philosophy, and drawing on not only philosophy, but also psychology, evolutionary theory, history, and literature in making a case for the importance of pluralism in moral life and in establishing the virtues of acceptance and accommodation. A central theme is that there is no single value or principle or ordering of values and principles that offers a uniquely true path for human living, but variations according to different contexts that carry within them a common core of human values. We should thus be modest about our own morality, learn from other approaches, and accommodate different practices in our pluralistic society.
Objections and Replies
Authors: Wong David B.
Published: September 2006

This chapter responds to the following objections against pluralistic relativism: it is unable to explain moral disagreement; it undermines confidence in one’s moral commitments; it makes learning from other cultures impossible; the notion of “local” criteria of adequacy for moralities cannot be regarded as criteria at all; it is not a form of relativism but rather a form of pluralism simpliciter; there is nothing like the fixed human nature presupposed in the argument for it; the functional conception of morality is biased toward consequentialist moralities.
Identity, Flourishing, and Relationship
Authors: Wong David B.
Published: September 2006

This chapter and the next two concern the ways that the functions of morality, human nature, and the particular circumstances of a group at a given time all work together to impose constraints of varying levels of generality on what constitutes an adequate morality for that group. Drawing from the Chinese Confucian and Western communitarian traditions and their conceptions of human nature as social, this chapter explains why personal values must be present in all adequate moralities. A conception of practical identities is presented, along with the necessary conditions for such identities to possess the properties of effective agency (constituted by abilities to formulate reasonably clear priorities among one’s moral ends, and to plan and perform actions that have a reasonable chance of realizing those ends, given all the conditions beyond one’s control). Drawing from an array of studies in psychology, this chapter argues that effective moral agency requires special relationships that are shaped and guided by special moral duties.
Does Psychological Realism Constrain the Content of Moralities?
Authors: Wong David B.
Published: September 2006

This chapter discusses a possible constraint on moralities based on psychological realism, and in particular what is realistic to expect in the way of adherence to impersonal values when most human beings strongly favor personal values such as special relationships and personal projects and commitments. A focus of the discussion is a possible constraint on the achievement of strong forms of equality. It is argued that such a constraint seems most plausible when one focuses on the strength of acquisitive and competitive motives as they appear in places such as the United States, but the existence of cultural variability in what is viewed as acceptable inequalities weighs against taking the strength of such motives for granted. A stronger case can be made for the conclusion that commitments to impersonal values are best mediated through personal values such as commitments to community.
Morality and Need
Authors: Wong David B.
Published: September 2006

Morality can enter deeply into human identity, but we can question whether its influence is a good thing for us. Though a traditional goal of moral philosophy is to establish that the individual’s flourishing requires morality, this chapter explores the more modest and achievable goal of showing that morality is consistent with flourishing. Criticism is directed at the pessimistic stance, based on Foucault, that morality’s constitution of individual selves is necessarily an exercise in power and domination. A case is made, partly through the exploration of an argument from Xunzi, that morality answers to powerful needs in human beings, and partly through discussion of the story of John Sassall, a country doctor who found fulfillment not only in caring for his patients but in bearing witness to their lives. He also found deep depression in recognizing the limits on what he could do for his patients, and this leads to the conclusion that any vindication of morality must be incomplete as long as those who seek to accomplish moral ends must do so in oppressive structures that drastically limit the life prospects of many.
Open to All Parties
Authors: Beneke Chris
Published: September 2006

This chapter examines religious discourse in mid-century America, which was characterized by unprecedented ecumenism and surprisingly widespread praise for integration. Beginning in the mid-1740s, religious writers stressed the common principles that Protestants of all denominations shared. During the same period, colonial institutions of many types declared themselves “open to all parties” — by which they usually meant all religious parties. Extended accounts of the Free Mason movement, the legislative assemblies of New York and Philadelphia, and the fight for control of King’s College (Columbia University), demonstrate a growing consciousness of religious diversity and the increasing priority accorded to interdenominational cooperation.
“Equality or Nothing!”
Authors: Beneke Chris
Published: September 2006

This chapter connects the demise of exclusive religious establishments with the foundation of republican governments. It also traces the extension of equal recognition to previously marginal groups, such as Roman Catholics. Indeed, by the founding period, the wholesale condemnation of religious minorities had become quite rare and the presumption that faith of many different kinds was better than no faith at all had become widespread. James Madison’s struggle to extend the meaning of “religion” in the Virginia legislature and John Carroll’s efforts to ensure equal rights and recognition for Catholics highlight the widening scope of American pluralism.
Conclusion
Authors: Beneke Chris
Published: September 2006

The conclusion delineates the 19th-century boundaries of American religious pluralism. Those limits emerged most clearly in the persistence of anti-Semitism, the violence inflicted upon Mormons in western New York, Illinois, and Missouri, and the vitriolic common school debates of 1840 and 1841, which pitted New York’s Roman Catholic leaders against the Protestant-dominated Public School Society. In the case of the Mormons and the Catholics, especially, the 18th-century formula of equal rights for private worship and public inclusion failed. Anonymous living in the increasingly populous cities and the vast expanses of cheap land in the west allowed religious groups to avoid integration. Meanwhile, the continued dominance of Calvinist Protestantism made such isolation attractive. Yet, an important precedent had already been set. The success that early Americans had in maintaining civil peace and encouraging cooperative endeavors between different religious groups provided a reassuring template for future encounters with diversity.
Introduction
Authors: Beneke Chris
Published: September 2006

The introduction provides an overview of the themes of the book. It describes the visit of the Roman Catholic bishop John Carroll to Boston in 1791 in order to indicate an 18th-century perspective on religious toleration, comparing this to issues surrounding political and ethnic diversity today. It explains how the controversial emergence of religious inclusion, equality, and cooperation is the history of America’s first great attempt to accommodate diversity and its first experiment with pluralism. It makes some caveats as to the nature of its study and suggets how the rest of the book is an introduction to the kinds of problems that arise when a culture premised upon uniformity gives way to a culture premised upon diversity.
Economic Development and Labor Conditions
Authors: Flanagan Robert J.
Published: September 2006

This chapter reveals the influence of economic development, national economic and political institutions, and social diversity on labor conditions. Putting globalization aside, the foremost positive influence on labor conditions is level of development (a country’s real per capita income). Policies that raise per capita income improve virtually all labor conditions. At any level of development, however, countries still differ in their labor conditions. The chapter shows how democratic government, protection of property rights, and the degree of ethnic and religious diversity influence this remaining international variation in labor conditions.
Trade and Labor Conditions
Authors: Flanagan Robert J.
Published: September 2006

This chapter examines the effect of international trade on labor conditions around the world. Evidence developed in the chapter shows that open trade policies improve working conditions by raising per capita income, as international trade theory predicts. Countries with open trade policies also have superior labor rights, and labor rights improve over time in countries that adopt open trade policies. In the short run, trade clearly enhances the working conditions of workers in export industries (including those working in export processing zones) but threatens the conditions of workers whose companies compete with imports. The evidence shows that with the passage of time, all workers benefit by moving into more productive employment settings. The evidence in this chapter implies that trade sanctions are likely to worsen labor conditions in target countries.
Multinational Corporations and Labor Conditions
Authors: Flanagan Robert J.
Published: September 2006

This chapter studies the effects of multinational companies on labor conditions around the world. The evidence shows that (1) the economic presence of multinationals in foreign countries is often overstated, (2) multinationals pay higher wages than host-country companies in both industrialized and developing countries, and (3) when multinationals acquire host country businesses, they institute changes in production methods and human resource management practices that raise productivity sufficiently to support higher wages. The evidence also rejects the race-to-the-bottom view that poor labor conditions attract multinational companies. Most flows of foreign direct investment occur between advanced countries with high labor standards and are influenced by market size and potential investment risk rather than labor conditions. The chapter also examines and evaluates the efficacy of corporate codes of conduct for improving labor conditions.