Moral Motivation in Plato’s Republic?

Against the view that knowledge of the Good motivates philosophers in Plato’s Republic to rule, this paper argues that philosophers are ‘dependent rational animals’ (MacIntyre), whose education fosters a widespread sense of mutual interdependence in the community. The recognition of this dependency is a bond of philia, the cultivation of which ensures that citizens care for one another and assist each other to their mutual advantage. Ruling is how philosophers express the reciprocity characteristic of friendship, make a return for benefits received, and show care for others in their service. By tracking the language of ‘nurture’, ‘sharing’, and ‘community’ in Socrates’ replies to Glaucon’s concern and showing how it is embedded within this sense of mutual interdependence and philia, I argue that philia, a certain kind of affective bond, or love, motivates philosophers’ willingness to rule and preserves the integrity of the eudaemonist framework of the Republic.

Power, government, and political life

The chapter offers a survey of the central features of later medieval political life. It was often bloody, but the resort to bloodshed was politically purposeful, and the focus on individuals reflected the parts they played in larger frameworks of power. Those frameworks were both ‘private’ and ‘public’—they were followings of men and women, linked together in relationships of marriage, service, or friendship for mutual advantage; but they also involved the performance of official roles, the negotiation of public business, the management of institutions. The frameworks of power were national, international, and ‘transnational’. Europe was divided into self-conscious political spaces, each with a measure of sovereignty and identity, but these spaces also overlapped and, within virtually any political setting, authority was contestable: it involved a complicated mixture of relationships among elites and much wider movements, voiced and promoted by representative assemblies and popular revolts.

Conscientious objection in firms

This article asks whether firms should exempt employees when they object to elements of their work that go against their conscience. Fairness requires that we follow the rules of an organization we have joined voluntarily only if these rules express mutual advantage. In corporations, I argue that subordination and exemption provides for mutual advantage better than subordination plus right of exit. This is because agents want to protect their conscientious convictions, even in hierarchical organizations geared towards efficient preference satisfaction. Thus exemptions should be granted in unforeseeable circumstances, provided the costs are limited.

Evaluation of policy in the vocational education system revitalization in Indonesia: Examining the teaching factory readiness of the industry

A future forecast for 2030-2040 predicts that Indonesia will face a demographic bonus, in which the number of a productive aging population is greater than the unproductive age population. Graduates are expected to compete for a job on the national and international levels. It is a challenge where the Indonesian government began to enforce revitalization towards industries to collaborate with schools, and industries are expected to contribute to the implementation of the teaching factory, as both can contribute a mutual advantage in the long run. This research aims to illustrate the Indonesian government’s progress, starting from 2016-2019, on revitalizing the vocational education system. This research highlights a qualitative research approach with a micro-level case study, using the teaching factory implementation parameter in VHS Suryacipta to find industries readiness based on their perspectives, expectations, and challenges. The findings indicate the government effort has successfully improved the revitalization program. However, it still lacks field implementation. VHS Suryacipta still lacks collaboration follow-up with the industries, and the social mores of Karawang traditional society be the main factor behind the high unemployment rate. Other factors are the industries’ capacity for employment, confidentiality aspect, misperception between industries and local government. Industries find difficulties to match with government agenda, and this situation revealed that industries are not ready for collaboration.

Intergenerational Cooperation and the Social Contract

John Rawls made the enormously influential suggestion that society can be conceived of as a “cooperative venture for mutual advantage,” governed by a “theory of justice,” which is a set of principles that specify an acceptable division of the “benefits and burdens of cooperation.” It follows, however, that if there are no opportunities for mutually advantageous cooperation in a particular domain of social interaction, then these interactions cannot be governed by principles of justice. Certain commentators have argued that this analysis precludes the application of Rawlsian-style contract theory to questions of intergenerational justice, on the grounds that there can be no reciprocity between non-contemporaneous generations, and thus no possibility of intergenerational cooperation. Yet despite having become influential in the literature, this claim is incorrect, being based upon an overly narrow, direct conception of reciprocity. Many systems of cooperation, both in nature and in human society, are based on indirect reciprocity, where the individual from whom a benefit is received need not be the same as the individual to whom a benefit is provided. Once the possibility of indirect reciprocity is taken into account, one can see that there is no obstacle to the development of systems of intergenerational cooperation. The analysis of such systems provides the foundation for a contractual approach to questions of intergenerational justice.

Why do inequality and deprivation produce high crime and low trust?

Humans sometimes cooperate to mutual advantage, and sometimes exploit one another. In industrialised societies, the prevalence of exploitation, in the form of crime, is related to the distribution of economic resources: more unequal societies tend to have higher crime, as well as lower social trust. We created a model of cooperation and exploitation to explore why this should be. Distinctively, our model features a desperation threshold, a level of resources below which it is extremely damaging to fall. Agents do not belong to fixed types, but condition their behaviour on their current resource level and the behaviour in the population around them. We show that the optimal action for individuals who are close to the desperation threshold is to exploit others. This remains true even in the presence of severe and probable punishment for exploitation, since successful exploitation is the quickest route out of desperation, whereas being punished does not make already desperate states much worse. Simulated populations with a sufficiently unequal distribution of resources rapidly evolve an equilibrium of low trust and zero cooperation: desperate individuals try to exploit, and non-desperate individuals avoid interaction altogether. Making the distribution of resources more equal or increasing social mobility is generally effective in producing a high cooperation, high trust equilibrium; increasing punishment severity is not.

Heterogeneous Network Spectrum Allocation Scheme for Network-Assisted D2D Communications

To meet the drastic growth of mobile traffic, next-generation wireless networks integrate existing technologies such as dual-connectivity (DC) and network-assisted device-to-device (D2D) communications. In this paper, we present a new spectrum allocation scheme for a heterogeneous system, which incorporates both technologies. For the effective collaboration of individual network agents, we employ the ideas of cooperative games, and the spectrum allocation algorithm is implemented as a novel joint-bargaining process. Based on the bargaining solutions of classical Nash, weighted Nash, and Nash bargaining with coalition structure, our three-step interactive approach can leverage the full synergy of different bargaining concepts. Under the dynamic changing HetNet environments, we can take various benefits in a rational way while handling comprehensively the DC-based D2D communication issue and reach an agreement that gives mutual advantage. The main novelty of our proposed scheme is to ensure a relevant tradeoff between conflicting requirements during HetNet operations. Finally, we conduct extensive simulation study and illustrate that the proposed scheme provides a considerable performance improvement by comparison with the existing protocols.

Justice and its motives: On Peter Vanderschraaf’s strategic justice

Peter Vanderschraaf’s Strategic Justice is a powerful elaboration and defense of what he calls ‘justice as mutual advantage’. Vanderschraaf opens Strategic Justice by observing that ‘Plato set a template for all future philosophers by raising two interrelated questions: (1) What precisely is justice? (2) Why should one be just?’. He answers that (1) justice consists of conventions which (2) are followed because each sees that doing so is in her interest. These answers depend upon two conditions which Vanderschraaf calls Baseline Consistency and Negative Mutual Expectations. I contend that the plausibility of the first condition depends upon principles which are prior to Vanderchraaf’s conventions of justice and that the second condition does not account for the interest Vanderschraaf must think we take in those principles. I therefore worry that Vanderschraaf does what he accuses other theorists of justice as mutual advantage of doing: going outside the bounds of justice as mutual advantage. To lay the groundwork for his conditions, Vanderschraaf analyzes the circumstances of justice. I argue that, his claims to the contrary notwithstanding, he does not take the circumstances to be the kind of conditions Hume takes them to be, but that he has good reason to do so.

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Anarchy, State, and Utopia is arguably the twentieth century’s most influential work of political philosophy after Rawls’s Theory of Justice. It substantially responds to Rawls, despite ranging over many topics. The Experience Machine, discussed in Part I, engagingly articulates Nozick’s discomfort with utilitarianism, and with Rawls’s way of modeling separate personhood. That is, Rawls depicts bargainers as separate consumers, entitled to separate shares, while dismissing the separateness of what they do as arbitrary. Part II continues to pound on the incongruousness of respecting our separateness as consumers (see his discussions of distributing grades and mates) while implicitly denigrating and even denying our separateness as producers. Part III argues that true utopia would not impose a favored vision of utopia while silencing incompatible rivals. It would instead be a cooperative society for mutual advantage, premised on everyone coming to the table with a robust right to say no to unattractive offers.