Cosmopolitanism

2010 ◽  
pp. 90-107
Author(s):  
Robert A. Schultz
Keyword(s):  
Social Institutions ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Human Ability ◽  
The Social ◽  
Human Reality ◽  
Relevant Group ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Political Economic

Cosmopolitanism is the view that the relevant ethical community is all of humanity. In this chapter, I will examine three somewhat different cosmopolitan theories: The pluralist theory of Thomas Pogge (2002), the social contract theory of Charles Beitz (1979 and 1999), and the utilitarian theory of Peter Singer (2004). All theories hold that humanity as a whole is the relevant ethical community for global ethics. All theories also hold that ethical principles are essentially principles for individuals. Taking the individual as ethically primary may be what makes cosmopolitanism plausible. Human reality for these theorists is just individual human beings endowed with moral principles. But it is not an accidental fact that human beings live in society. Like ants, termites, lions and chimpanzees, they have evolved so that living in groups is not optional for them. The many benefits produced by social institutions, whether formal or informal, depend on our human ability to forgo self-interest in the interest of the relevant group. The group principles—ethical, political, economic—allowing us to do this are not optional either, especially those having to do with nations. So to begin with it seems that cosmopolitan theories may have too limited a view of human reality. However, I will give these theories a chance. The main questions I will ask of each theory are: The rationale for basing ethics on individuals as members of the group all of humanity; and the plausibility of each theory as a basis for transnational ethics.

On Measuring the Social Opportunity Cost of Labour in the Presence of Tariffs and an Informal Sector (The Distinguishedl Lecture)

1992 ◽  
Vol 31 (4I) ◽  
pp. 535-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Ali Khan
Keyword(s):  
Informal Sector ◽  
Opportunity Cost ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
Open Letter ◽  
Review Of The Literature ◽  
The Social ◽  
Action Project ◽  
Relevant Group ◽  
Net Benefits ◽  
The Individual

Harberger introduced his influential 1971 essay with the following words. This paper is intended not as a scientific study, nor as a review of the literature, but rather as a tract - an open letter to the profession, as it were - pleading that three basic postulates be accepted as providing a conventional framework for applied welfare economics. The postulates are: (a) The competitive demand price for a given unit measures the value of that unit to the demander; (b) The competitive supply price for a given unit measures the value of that unit to the supplier; and (c) When evaluating the net benefits or costs of a given action (project, programme, or policy), the costs and benefits accruing to each member of the relevant group (e.g., a nation) should normally be added without regard to the individual(s) to whom they accrue.

The Measure of Greatness

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Nature ◽  
Complex Trajectory ◽  
The Many ◽  
Human Excellence ◽  
Ethical Perspectives

Magnanimity is a virtue that has led many lives. Foregrounded early on by Plato as the philosophical virtue par excellence, it became one of the crown jewels in Aristotle’s account of human excellence and was accorded an equally salient place by other ancient thinkers. One of the most distinctive elements of the ancient tradition to filter into the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds, it sparked important intellectual engagements there and went on to carve deep tracks through several later philosophies that inherited from this tradition. Under changing names, under reworked forms, it continued to breathe in the thought of Descartes and Hume, Kant and Nietzsche, and their successors. Its many lives have been joined by important continuities. Yet they have also been fragmented by discontinuities—discontinuities reflecting larger shifts in ethical perspectives and competing answers to questions about the nature of the good life, the moral nature of human beings, and their relationship to the social and natural world they inhabit. They have also been punctuated by moments of controversy in which the greatness of this vision of human greatness has itself been called into doubt. This volume provides a window to the complex trajectory of a virtue whose glitter has at times been as heady as it has been divisive. By exploring the many lives it has lived, we will be in a better position to decide whether and why this is a virtue we might still want to make central to our own ethical lives.

Archaeology and the Letters of Paul

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Salah Nasrallah
Keyword(s):  
Judith Butler ◽  
First Century ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Apostle Paul ◽  
The Social ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Archaeological Materials ◽  
Feminist Historiography ◽  
The Many ◽  
Political Economic

Through case studies of archaeological materials from local contexts, Archaeology and the Letters of Paul illuminates the social, political, economic, and religious lives of those whom the apostle Paul addressed. Roman Ephesos, a likely setting for the household of Philemon, provides evidence of the slave trade. An inscription from Galatia seeks to restrain traveling Roman officials, illuminating how the travels of Paul, Cephas, and others may have disrupted communities. At Philippi, a donation list from a Silvanus cult provides evidence of abundant giving amid economic limitations, paralleling practices of local Christ followers. In Corinth, a landscape of grief includes monuments and bones, a context that illumines Corinthian practices of baptism on behalf of the dead and the provocative idea that one could live “as if not” mourning. Rome and the Letter to the Romans are the grounds to investigate ideas of time and race not only in the first century, when we find an Egyptian obelisk inserted as a timepiece into Augustus’s mausoleum complex, but also of Mussolini’s new Rome. Thessalonikē demonstrates how letters, legend, and cult are invented out of a love for Paul, after his death. The book articulates a method for bringing together biblical texts with archaeological remains in order to reconstruct the lives of the many adelphoi—brothers and sisters—whom Paul and his co-writers address. It is informed by feminist historiography and gains inspiration from thinkers like Claudia Rankine, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Wendy Brown, and Katie Lofton.

scholarly journals The allure of celebrities: unpacking their polysemic consumer appeal

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (10) ◽  
pp. 2025-2053
Author(s):  
Markus Wohlfeil ◽  
Anthony Patterson ◽  
Stephen J. Gould
Keyword(s):  
Design Methodology ◽  
Supporting Evidence ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Total Period ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Link ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Practical Implications

Purpose This paper aims to explain a celebrity’s deep resonance with consumers by unpacking the individual constituents of a celebrity’s polysemic appeal. While celebrities are traditionally theorised as unidimensional semiotic receptacles of cultural meaning, the authors conceptualise them here instead as human beings/performers with a multi-constitutional, polysemic consumer appeal. Design/methodology/approach Supporting evidence is drawn from autoethnographic data collected over a total period of 25 months and structured through a hermeneutic analysis. Findings In rehumanising the celebrity, the study finds that each celebrity offers the individual consumer a unique and very personal parasocial appeal as the performer, the private person behind the public performer, the tangible manifestation of either through products and the social link to other consumers. The stronger these constituents, individually or symbiotically, appeal to the consumer’s personal desires, the more s/he feels emotionally attached to this particular celebrity. Research limitations/implications Although using autoethnography means that the breadth of collected data is limited, the depth of insight this approach garners sufficiently unpacks the polysemic appeal of celebrities to consumers. Practical implications The findings encourage talent agents, publicists and marketing managers to reconsider underlying assumptions in their talent management and/or celebrity endorsement practices. Originality/value While prior research on celebrity appeal has tended to enshrine celebrities in a “dehumanised” structuralist semiosis, which erases the very idea of individualised consumer meanings, this paper reveals the multi-constitutional polysemy of any particular celebrity’s personal appeal as a performer and human being to any particular consumer.

The Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism: Germany and Japan in Comparison. Edited by Wolfgang Streeck and Kozo Yamamura. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. xvii, 261.

2003 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 310-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
William M. Tsutsui
Keyword(s):  
Social Institutions ◽  
Economic Governance ◽  
Free Markets ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Economies ◽  
American Standard ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Systematic Understanding ◽  
The Many

This volume explores phenomena frequently noted (yet seldom analyzed) in the scholarly literature: the profound similarities in the industrialization processes and the contemporary political economies of Germany and Japan. These parallels—not just in the early stages of industrialization, but through the experiences of depression and war, and on to the rise of postwar “miracle” economies in both nations—are often casually ascribed to the late-developer effect, to the strategic imitation of German economic institutions in Japan, or to cultural factors, from lingering “feudal remnants” to enduring “traditional” social structures. Tagging the economic regimes which had evolved in Germany and Japan by the 1970s “nonliberal” capitalist systems, the essays in this collection seek to investigate systematically “the many similarities between the two capitalisms, the no less intriguing differences between them, and the differences between the two and Anglo-American ‘standard capitalism’” (p. xiii). More specifically, this volume examines “the origins of some of the social institutions that have constrained the spread of free markets within the capitalist economies of Germany and Japan while providing them with alternate mechanisms of economic governance” (p. 5). Throughout, the contributors argue for a more subtle, historically grounded, and systematic understanding of the distinctive practices and institutions of the German and Japanese “nationally embedded capitalisms.”

Carl Menger's theory of invisible-hand explanations

2000 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 529-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Haller
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Invisible Hand ◽  
The Social ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The Individual

Carl Menger's theory of invisible-hand explanations is rooted in his methodology of the social sciences. Contrary to his 18th-century Scottish forerunners he explains both the emergence and the persistence of unplanned social institutions exclusively by the individual pursuit of perceived self-interest. Contrary to Hayek's evolutionary functionalism, Menger's theory is not confined to the explanation of efficient or beneficial institutions. And contrary to Buchanan and Vanberg's constitutional contractualism, it does not require that people form stable preferences over rules.

The Not-so-trivial Truth of Methodological Individualism

1998 ◽  
pp. 69-76
Author(s):  
Maarten Franssen
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Methodological Individualism ◽  
Intentional Stance ◽  
Theoretical Terms ◽  
The Social ◽  
Intentional Psychology ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Social Entities

I defend the truth of the principle of methodological individualism in the social sciences. I do so by criticizing mistaken ideas about the relation between individual people and social entities held by earlier defenders of the principle. I argue, first, that social science is committed to the intentional stance; the domain of social science, therefore, coincides with the domain of intentionally described human action. Second, I argue that social entitites are theoretical terms, but quite different from the entities used in the natural sciences to explain our empirical evidence. Social entities (such as institutions) are conventional and open-ended constructions, the applications of which is a matter of judgment, not of discovery. The terms in which these social entities are constructed are the beliefs, expectations and desires, and the corresponding actions of individual people. The relation between the social and the individual 'levels' differs fundamentally from that between, say, the cellular and the molecular in biology. Third, I claim that methodological individualism does not amount to a reduction of social science to psychology; rather, the science of psychology should be divided. Intentional psychology forms in tandom with the analysis of social institutions, unitary psycho-social science; cognitive psychology tries to explain how the brain works and especially how the intentional stance is applicable to human behavior.

Life After Life: Bioarchaeology and Post-mortem Agency

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 523-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Arnold
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
The Body ◽  
Post Mortem ◽  
Select Group ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Anxious Group

In the alternative fairy tale The Princess Bride, as William Goldman's character Miracle Max reanimates the apparent corpse of the hero Westley, he tells the anxious group observing the procedure: ‘There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive’ (Goldman 2007, 313). Only a select group of the dead can be characterized as being ‘slightly alive’, in the post-mortem agency sense, however, and the case studies presented here explore the many ways in which this subcategory of mostly dead individuals have engaged with and continue to impact the living in the past as well as today. Several themes emerge as especially salient: the iteration in the death-scape of the dynamic tension between the individual and the social group, which can result in transgression as well as conformity in the disposition of the body and its effects on the living; the symbolic capital represented by some dead bodies and the ways in which their potency may be affected by various forms of contextual association; and the ways in which the manipulation of the dead for political purposes is subject to constraints specific to the cultural contexts in which these interactions take place.

scholarly journals Realisation of Social Needs of Students in the Field of Education in Ukraine

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 38-43
Author(s):  
T. G. Yermakova
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Educational Needs ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Personal Qualities ◽  
The Individual

Education of students in today’s conditions requires new ideas and concepts that are related to the peculiarities of the socio-economic situation in society, namely: revaluation of values, changes in priorities of prestigious professions, contradictory attitude to education in the labor market, lack of a clear youth policy, adequate to modern conditions.Today’s education should become not just one of the subsystems of the social sphere, which satisfies a number of personal needs, but also a specific domain of social life, in which the future is modeled, resources of development are formed, and the negative effects of the functioning of other social institutions are compensated. As a result, the education system essentially extends its sphere of influence. One of the most important characteristics of student youth is its social needs, a large proportion of which is implemented in the field of education. Concerning higher education, certain requirements are put forward regarding the implementation of social needs of student youth; at the same time it is the institutional environment that mostly influences the formation of student social.Defining the development vectors of the education system requires the search for answers to questions relating to contemporary students, its social needs and expectations in relation to higher education, as well as the clarification of the conditions correspondence that education creates to realize its demands. The article highlights the peculiarities of student social needs in the field of education and their implementation; the content of such concepts as «needs», «social needs», «educational needs» were clarified.It was emphasized that social needs are connected with the inclusion of the individual in the family, in various social groups and communities, in the various spheres of production and non-production activities, in the life of society as a whole. These are the needs for work, social and economic activity, as well as spiritual culture, that is, everything that is a product of social life. They are needs of a special kind, the satisfaction of which is necessary to support the life of the social person, social groups and society as a whole.Social needs are met by the organizational efforts of society members through social institutions. Satisfying needs ensures social stability and social progress, dissatisfaction generates social conflicts. Social institutions are the leading components of the social structure of society, which integrate and coordinate the actions of society members, social groups and regulate social relations in various spheres of public life. Four groups of social needs were defined:- Vital for the social person needs, whose dissatisfaction leads to the elimination of a social person or the revolutionary transformation of social institutions, within which this satisfaction occurs;- Needs, the satisfaction of which ensures the functioning of the social person at the level of social norms, as well as allows the evolution of social institutions to be realized;- Needs, the satisfaction of which occurs at the level of minimum social norms, which ensures the preservation of the social person, but not its development; - Needs, the satisfaction of which provides comfortable (for data of socio-cultural area and social time) conditions of operation and development.The article gives attention to the relation between the concepts of «social needs» and «educational needs» and shows where they overlap. The existence of educational needs is an essential feature of students. Educational need is a need arising from the contradiction between the existing and necessary (desired) level of education and encourages the person to eliminate this contradiction.Educational needs were defined as the needs for the formation of the education means of those personal qualities that contribute to personal self-realization and the formation of personal qualities in the field of education that will enable them to obtain the desired social benefits and improve the social well-being of the individual. Such qualities are: high level of intellectual development; theoretical knowledge and practical skills necessary for professional activity; communicative skills and a high level of culture; personal qualities (integrity, workability, creativity, etc.). Education itself is a factor that allows the formation and accumulation of socially significant qualities in an individual’s arsenal that enable them to receive the benefits, satisfy the urgent needs and be realized as an active and active-oriented member of society.It was emphasized that in today’s conditions, students according to their characteristics are quite different from all other sections of the population, first of all ideological formation, influence mobility and their kinds of needs, which to a great extent determine its social well-being.Social needs of students are considered in connection with the functions of education, primarily with the functions of intelligence reproduction of society, vocational, economic and social. The article used data from nationwide surveys of students «Higher Education in Ukraine: Students’ Public Opinion» and «Higher Education in Reform Conditions: Changes in Public Opinion» conducted by Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation in 2015 and 2017 respectively; the data of a sociological survey «Values of Ukrainian Youth», conducted in 2016 by the Center for Independent Sociological Research «OMEGA», by request of Ministry of Youth and Sport of Ukraine.Based on the data of sociological research, we concluded that the level of social needs satisfaction of students in the field of higher education is not high. We need more detailed analysis of students who are studying at various educational institutions, as well as to identify the trends that are characteristic for education sections in different areas of study.

scholarly journals Is Trauma a Social Phenomenon That Leads to Gang Involvement?

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Morgan Leksen
Keyword(s):  
Social Institutions ◽  
Social Phenomenon ◽  
Youth Gang ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Gang Involvement ◽  
The Social ◽  
Need For Support ◽  
Life Path ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Societal Responsibility

This paper examines the effects of trauma on youth gang involvement. It focuses on the repercussions that trauma can have on youth, which may result in them looking for like-minded adolescents who are in gangs. The need for support can stem from the reoccurring trauma that the individuals face at an early age and the gang can appear as a safe haven from their lives. This paper argues that the experiences of direct and indirect trauma can put these adolescents on a different life path compared to their peers. Youth need to be actively supported in their families and in the education system in order to succeed. The way society reacts and responds to adolescents who are experiencing trauma will set the tone on how they develop in the future. These youth should be seen as a societal responsibility, and when they are left behind or fall through the cracks of certain social institutions, it should be seen as a failure by the social system and not the individual being seen as a failure. Because of these failures, trauma is a social phenomenon that can lead to youth gang involvement.

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