Democracy

Democracy is a term that is used to denote a variety of distinct objects and ideas. Democracy describes either a set of political institutions or an ideal of collective self-rule. Democracy can also be short for a normative principle of either legitimacy or justice. Finally, democracy might be used to denote an egalitarian attitude. These four uses of the term should be kept distinct and raises separate conceptual and normative issues. The value of democracy, whether democratic political institutions or democratic self-rule, is either instrumental, non-instrumental, or both. The non-instrumental value of democracy derives either from the alleged fairness of majority rule or from the value of the social relationships enabled by participation in democratic procedures. The instrumental value of democracy lends support from a growing body of empirical research. Yet, the claim that democracy has a positive causal effect on public goods is inconclusive with respect to the moral justification of democratic institutions. Normative reasons for democracy’s instrumental value must instead appeal to the fact that it contributes to equality, liberty, truth, or the realization of popular will. Democracy as a principle of either political legitimacy or justice is a normative view that evades concerns with the definition and value of democracy. Normative democracy is a claim about the conditions either for legitimacy or justice of either public authority or coercion. Debates in normative democracy are largely divorced from the conceptual and empirical concerns that inform studies of democracy elsewhere. The boundaries of the people entitled to participate in collective decisions is a question that applies to all four uses of democracy. The boundary question raises three distinct issues. The first is the extent of inclusion required among the members of the unit. The second is if membership in the unit is necessary for inclusion or if people that are not recognized as members are on certain conditions also entitled to participate. The third and final issue concerns the boundaries of the unit itself.

Nephite Secularization; or, Picking and Choosing in The Book of Mormon

This chapter considers The Book of Mormon as a singular literary reflection on secularization as an effect of religious pluralism. The defining event in Joseph Smith’s early life was a visionary experience occasioned by a crisis over religious choice, wherein conversion is refigured as persuasion. Although published more than a decade later, The Book of Mormon stands as a monumental historical interrogation of the conditions that gave rise to this crisis and an archive of narrative and theological strategies for its resolution. Curiously, the book bypasses European church history entirely to recast standard narratives of secularization—such as those proposed by Charles Taylor and Peter Berger—in distinctly New World terms. Throughout this counterhistory, The Book of Mormon attempts to reconcile tacit commitments to religious choice and an egalitarian attitude toward divine revelation with the need for an orthodox center. It ultimately discovers a resolution not in theology but in narratology.

Cardinals, Ordinals, and the Prospects for a Fregean Foundation

There are multiple formal characterizations of the natural numbers available. Despite being inter-derivable, they plausibly codify different possible applications of the naturals – doing basic arithmetic, counting, and ordering – as well as different philosophical conceptions of those numbers: structuralist, cardinal, and ordinal. Some influential philosophers of mathematics have argued for a non-egalitarian attitude according to which one of those characterizations is ‘more basic’ or ‘more fundamental’ than the others. This paper addresses two related issues. First, we review some of these non-egalitarian arguments, lay out a laundry list of different, legitimate, notions of relative priority, and suggest that these arguments plausibly employ different such notions. Secondly, we argue that given a metaphysical-cum-epistemological gloss suggested by Frege's foundationalist epistemology, the ordinals are plausibly more basic than the cardinals. This is just one orientation to relative priority one could take, however. Ultimately, we subscribe to an egalitarian attitude towards these formal characterizations: they are, in some sense, equally ‘legitimate’.

STRATEGI PENGEMBANGAN PENDIDIKAN MULTIKULTURAL DI INDONESIA

Multicultural education needs to be nurtured both in formal and non-formal education because of Indonesia's cultural potential, tradition, and geographical environment, and demographics is remarkable. Education has a major role to play in promoting multicultural understanding. The cultivation of such understanding should be carried out as early as possible, so that it will continue to be constructed in the cognition of the child's sense of ownership and pride of the nation's culture until he grows up so that a democratic and egalitarian attitude will emerge to accept cultural diversity. To achieve that, the strategy of multicultural education development is needed. Multicultural education development strategies that can be undertaken, ie curriculum development, professional quality improvement of educational staff, development of education management systems, development of higher education system, equality of community perception, inculcation of recognition and appreciation of diversity (culture or culture, ethnicity, race, Religion, worldview and so on), avoiding views that assume that one group is superior to the other, and fosters and accustoms to a dialogical attitude.

POVERTY MEASUREMENT: PRIORITARIANISM, SUFFICIENCY AND THE ‘I'S OF POVERTY

The seminal contribution of Sen (1976) led to a new way to conceptualize and measure absolute poverty, by arguing for the need to ‘take note of the inequality among the poor’ (Sen 1976: 227). Since then, the ‘Inequality’ of poverty has become the third ‘I’ of poverty, which together with the ‘Incidence’ and the ‘Intensity’ of it constitute the dimensions deemed relevant for poverty evaluation. In this paper, we first argue that the interest in the third ‘I’ of poverty actually originates from a prioritarian (Parfit 1995) rather than an egalitarian attitude. Further, we illustrate the inability of the three ‘I's to fully comprise the criteria for the assessment of poverty which are de facto adopted by existing poverty indices. Some of them resolve distributional conflicts by following leximin, hence assigning a pivotal role to the worst off. We question the desirability of leximin, and conclude that giving absolute priority to the worst off is plausible only in cases where the latter has been identified by an exogenous threshold demarcating a significant difference in human suffering. Finally, we explore to what extent prioritarianism and the sufficiency argument of Frankfurt (1987), Crisp (2003) and Casal (2007) can help conceptualize giving absolute priority to individuals or groups indentified by exogenous (poverty and ultra-poverty) thresholds.

Recognition of Faces as a Function of Race, Attitudes, and Reported Cross-Racial Friendships

This study was conducted to assess the ability of 19 black male and 25 female college students to identify previously seen black and white male and female faces as a function of interracial experience, racial attitude, and cross-racial friendships. A significant own-race advantage in recognition was noted; concomitantly, more frequent false responses with white faces were recorded. Trends between performance and cross-racial friendship and interracial experience were noted for black males' recognition of white males' faces. No significant relationships between egalitarian attitude and recognition of white faces were observed. Measures of racial attitude and interracial experience were discussed.