An Interpretation of Value Change: A Philosophical Disquisition of Climate Change and Energy Transition Debate

Changing values may give rise to intergenerational conflicts, like in the ongoing climate change and energy transition debate. This essay focuses on the interpretative question of how this value change can best be understood. To elucidate the interpretation of value change, two philosophical perspectives on value are introduced: Berlin’s value pluralism and Dworkin’s interpretivism. While both authors do not explicitly discuss value change, I argue that their perspectives can be used for interpreting value change in the case of climate change and the energy transition. I claim that Berlin’s pluralistic account of value would understand the value change as an intergenerational conflict and therefore provide a too narrow and static ground for understanding ongoing value change. Instead, by exploring Dworkin’s standpoint in moral epistemology, this essay distills a more encompassing perspective on how values may relate, converge, overlap, and change, fulfilling their functions in the course of climate change and energy transition. This perspective is further detailed by taking inspiration from Shue’s work on the (re)interpretation of equity in the climate change debate. I argue that the resulting perspective allows us to see value change as a gradual process rather than as a clash between generations and their values.

Education for Citizenship in a Changing Country

This chapter discusses some questions regarding the political theory of education in Ireland: 1. Which value commitments and attitudes should be encouraged to prepare children for their roles in society? 2. Who should decide what children learn? How is the role of the state to be balanced against that of parents and educational institutions? 3. How should education respond to increasing diversity and value pluralism? 4. To what extent should public education promote equality of opportunities? It identifies the concerns relevant to policy choices on these issues. The first section presents the basic structure of the Irish educational system. The second discusses its implications for debates on the authority and responsibility to educate, the third debates dealing with diversity, the fourth value education. The final section considers the idea of equality of opportunity in view of the different resources available to different schools.

The Neoclassical Decision-Making Paradigm and Environmental Valuation: An Environmental Ethics Perspective

The relationship between environmental ethics and the application of economic values to the environment has followed two main paths: (1) blocking attempts to value the environment economically by extending the concept of moral standing to elements of the natural world, and (2) attempting a pragmatic reconciliation that harnesses the efficacy of economic motivation while avoiding the excesses of an exclusively economic perspective. The pragmatic reconciliation must still come to grips with several ethical issues that confront environmental valuation. The fact that economics is grounded in a utilitarian consequentialism renders it susceptible to some long-standing deontological challenges having to do with rights and justice. Other challenges include a reluctance to embrace value pluralism, overly ambitious attempts at pricing, failure to incorporate deeper value commitments that do not take the form of preferences, and the inadequacies of a preference-satisfaction account of well-being.

Moral responses to uncertainty: The economies of worth towards a reconceptualization of decision making and management

The sizeable literature that deploys Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1991, 2006) “economies of worth” model of moral cognition to study organization and management under conditions of uncertainty and value pluralism is connoted by a striking variety of interests, terminology, and theorizing approaches. This review argues for the literature’s emerging cumulative cohesiveness and for its value as a source of concepts and problems for researchers exploring organizational behavior, organizational complexity, knowledge and innovation, organizational justice, and leadership. By mapping the literature onto the elements of the source model, the review induces several constructs that – though requiring integration and development – outline a distinctive conception of organization: the collective exercise of moral sense is necessarily coterminous with decision and policy making; information and formal structures and practices arise out of it, as opposed to forming its context; the core concern of management is the functionality of the socio-material networks in which it unfolds. After defining several integrative and developmental research questions and locating the roots of the literature’s variety in the specificities of the economies of worth’s interdisciplinary translation, the review concludes by proposing a research approach based on four epistemological and methodological shifts that retains the model’s core assumptions but moves beyond its special conceptual confines and uses more general tools.