"The aesthetics of relinquishment": Natural and Social Contracts in Beckett's "The End"

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-188
Author(s):  
Jana María Giles

This article explores the notion of Beckett as an ecocritical writer by considering Lawrence Buell's criteria for an environmentally-centered work in terms of Beckett's short prose piece "The End." As the nameless narrator moves from a monastic to a hermetic to a mendicant existence and then to death by suicide, he cycles between city and country, growing increasingly anonymous. Beckett casts doubt on the ethics of the "social contract," formed in human culture, and suggests that the "natural contract" between humans and their environment may be the viable one, although it may lead to relinquishment and death.

2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 479-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominique Peyrat-Guillard

This article proposes a study of the violation of contract process through a case study. The study is based on a discourse of the union, SUD Michelin, which is contrasted both with those of another union, the CFE-CGC Michelin and of the senior management of the corporation. The results highlight the possibility of applying Morrison and Robinson’s (1997) Psychological Contract Violation model at the social contract level. The emotional reactions appearing in the literature, which are associated with contract violations, can be seen in the union discourse of the SUD. The other union does not perceive any breach of contract. These differences may be attributed to the very nature of social contracts—relational in the first case, and more balanced in the second.


2021 ◽  
pp. 19-40
Author(s):  
Charles Devellennes

This chapter proposes a theory of the social contract, in the context of the gilets jaunes. This theory is detailed in the five chapters that follow. The theory proposed here is that the movement itself is best understood as a fundamental challenge to the existing social contract in France — and by extension to other social contracts throughout the world — and its history is not limited to the months of political turmoil it engendered in France or even to the past couple of years of political upheaval in the wider world, but it poses a challenge to the very future of political order. A rethinking of the social contract is necessary given this crisis, and framing the present political turmoil in philosophical terms will help shed some light on the opportunities for change that are arising, in part thanks to the movement.


1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas W. Dunfee

Extant social contracts, deriving from communities of individuals, constitute a significant source of ethical norms in business. When found consistent with general ethical theories through the application of a filtering test, these real social contracts generate prima facie duties of compliance on the part of those who expressly or impliedly consent to the terms of the social contract, and also on the part of those who take advantage of the instrumental value of the social contracts. Businesspeople typically participate in multiple communities and, as a consequence, encounter conflicting ethical norms. Priority rules can be devised to resolve such conflicts. The framework of extant social contracts merges normative and theoretical research in business ethics and specifies a domain for empirical studies.


2017 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myles McNutt

I explore how the controversy surrounding an LGBT story line on The 100 (2014–) points to the shifting social contracts of social media engagement between fans and the TV industry, as well as the challenges faced by fans and critics who attempted to solidify that contract in the wake of said controversy.


Author(s):  
David Everatt

Social contracts are concerned with the legitimacy of the state over the individual. The social contract offers mutual benefit and reciprocal obligation and is intrinsic to liberalism’s assertion that freedom is normative and encroaching on freedom requires justification. The social contract is both a philosophical idea and a toolkit for defusing conflict and tying participants to core liberal values. Talk of new social contracts, including intergenerational contracts, focus on maintaining a peaceful status quo, not transcending it. For the Global South in general, and youth in particular, the experience is more contract and less social. There seems little opportunity for southern youth to move from the margins to center stage, mimicking the inability of the Global South to do the same. Southern youth bear the brunt of limited economic opportunities, precarious employment, inequality, racism, and violence, compounding their marginalized place in society. What value can social contracting play beyond a short-term band-aid, unless it incorporates a fundamental rupture with the past?


2021 ◽  
Vol 128 ◽  
pp. 04007
Author(s):  
O.A. Karpenko ◽  
A.L. Zolkin ◽  
O.L. Girshevich ◽  
S.A. Buryakov

The problem of providing the low-income families with social contracts is review in this article. Analytics of economic indexes and the comparison with foreign countries’ experience are provided and directions of such contract providing are reviewed. The possibility of social contract providing for development of modern intellectual and innovative business is also mentioned. Social support on the base of social contract was firstly applied in Russia in 2012. The low-income citizen can receive the allowance if he meets successfully the conditions of agreement with social agency: find a work, start the business, pass the advanced courses or other actions on improvement of his conditions. Until 2020, the regions will provide this service voluntary and out of local budget resources. Usual the social workers receive the direct payments for each employed, and he can be resigned from the work if does not meet the requirements. The service is outsourced by non-state providers - non-commercial organizations and private companies - for additional competitiveness.


1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward J. Conry

Abstract:This article evaluates the social contract theorizing of Professors Thomas Donaldson, Thomas Dunfee and Michael Keeley. This theorizing is tested with G.E. Moore’s concept of moral authority, with moral psychology, and by managerial utility. Both strengths and weaknesses are found in the theories and the author concludes that while there is great potential, much work in theory development remains.


2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 147470491772171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Kornreich ◽  
Dyna Delle-Vigne ◽  
Damien Brevers ◽  
Juan Tecco ◽  
Salvatore Campanella ◽  
...  

Conditional reasoning (if p then q) is used very frequently in everyday situations. Conditional reasoning is impaired in brain-lesion patients, psychopathy, alcoholism, and polydrug dependence. Many neurocognitive deficits have also been described in schizophrenia. We assessed conditional reasoning in 25 patients with schizophrenia, 25 depressive patients, and 25 controls, using the Wason selection task in three different domains: social contracts, precautionary rules, and descriptive rules. Control measures included depression, anxiety, and severity of schizophrenia measures as a Verbal Intelligence Scale. Patients with schizophrenia were significantly impaired on all conditional reasoning tasks compared to depressives and controls. However, the social contract and precautions tasks yielded better results than the descriptive tasks. Differences between groups disappeared for social contract but remained for precautions and descriptive tasks when verbal intelligence was used as a covariate. These results suggest that domain-specific reasoning mechanisms, proposed by evolutionary psychologists, are relatively resilient in the face of brain network disruptions that impair more general reasoning abilities. Nevertheless, patients with schizophrenia could encounter difficulties understanding precaution rules and social contracts in real-life situations resulting in unwise risk-taking and misunderstandings in the social world.


2021 ◽  
pp. 47-60
Author(s):  
Vidadi Gafizovich Asadov

The article makes an attempt to analyze a new type of social assistance to low-income citizens, low-income families, as well as citizens in a difficult life situation in order to formulate proposals for its improvement. The President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin during the meeting with senators held on 23 September 2020 pointed out that "One of the key factors in war on poverty is the social contract" (https://ria.ru/20200923/bednost-1577654986.html). The social contract is a very effective type of social assistance, as it is aimed to activating the citizens themselves in increasing their level of material security. As a result of the contract, they get the opportunity to find a permanent income, including by opening their own business or running a personal subsidiary farm, solve their difficult life situation, retraining. Despite the positive dynamics of the increase in the number of signed social contracts, the mechanism of these contracts itself needs to be improved. In particular, the author suggests that social protection institutions move to proactive social work with poor citizens, informing them more fully about the features of the social contract. It is also proposed to transfer the distribution of quotas for the conclusion of a social contract in various areas of the activities carried out within its framework to the subjects of the Russian Federation, to revise the terms of the social contract in the direction of «job search».


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