Report from the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy最新文献

{"title":"Religion and the Public University","authors":"Samuel Kessler","doi":"10.13021/G8PPPQ.312013.189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13021/G8PPPQ.312013.189","url":null,"abstract":"It seems almost commonplace now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, to bemoan the crisis facing public higher education in America. (1) Funding at the federal and state levels - sometimes in decline, sometimes on the rise - feels more tenuous than ever. (2) To entice new students, colleges and universities have been creating and revamping majors, expanding study-abroad programs and internship options, and opening new recreational and research facilities, all while increasing tuition at rates well above inflation. (3) And we have recently been witness to a disturbing set of public shamings as schools disclose a culture of statistical inflation in pursuit of higher rankings in U.S. News and World Report (Perez-Pena and Slotnik 2012). The 2008 fiscal crisis and the fraught relationship between Congress and the White House have only added urgency to this already agitated discussion. Many reasons can explain the anxiety about the future of public higher education. This paper addresses one cause that is often unmentioned. It is my worry that millions of Americans who regard religion as central to their lives may have become disenchanted with and disenfranchised by public higher education. For one example among many, Liberty University in Virginia, founded by the Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell in 1971, has doubled its student body twice since 2007 alone. It now educates more than 60,000 students each semester - far more than even some of the largest public universities (Anderson 2013). Religious Americans who attend or send their children to parochial schools of higher education do not see their moral or political views reflected in or valued by public academia, which is often seen as dominated by left-of-center voices. (4) I believe that this sense of disenfranchisement leads religious Americans to send more and more of their children to private denominationally-affiliated colleges and seminaries instead of public universities. (5) This essay is organized into two major parts. To provide an overview of the crisis facing American higher education, I begin by discussing two representative texts, The University in Ruins by Bill Readings and The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand. These books describe different sets of problems and propose divergent (though complementary) kinds of solutions. The essay then takes up a vision of the university presented in the 1790s by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and compares his view with recent writings by the contemporary social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. I conclude by using these texts to suggest how public higher education could better accommodate religious Americans. Bill Readings and the University of Economics Two books on public education, one by the late literary scholar Bill Readings and the other by the cultural historian Louis Menand, present broad critiques of the contemporary public university. In a way, these two authors create a tension with each other. For Readings, the universit","PeriodicalId":82464,"journal":{"name":"Report from the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy","volume":"31 1","pages":"19-27"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66669255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Equity Hurdle in International Climate Negotiations","authors":"A. Light","doi":"10.13021/G8PPPQ.312013.190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13021/G8PPPQ.312013.190","url":null,"abstract":"Parties to the U.N. climate negotiations are now engaged in a three-year process to produce a new comprehensive global climate agreement. This agreement should attempt to satisfy competing demands from developed and developing countries for an equitable assignment of responsibilities for mitigating greenhouse gases. It should also be sensitive to national regulatory and legal circumstances. Unfortunately, the current basis for U.S. regulation of greenhouse gases is at odds with some approaches other nations take to the equitable reduction of emissions. This difference may make it difficult for the U.S. both to embrace a global treaty and to preserve its ability to cut its own emissions.","PeriodicalId":82464,"journal":{"name":"Report from the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy","volume":"31 1","pages":"28-35"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66669298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Are Negatives Positive","authors":"Robert K. Fullinwider","doi":"10.13021/G8PPPQ.312013.188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13021/G8PPPQ.312013.188","url":null,"abstract":"\"Does the Election Make You Want to Be Sedated?\" So read a late October headline. What was the irritant calling for sedation? The \"caustic\" attack ads the 2012 political season delivered in spades. With the presidential election still four weeks away, Las Vegas television stations were featuring 10,000 political commercials a week. And Las Vegas ranked only tenth on the list of adsaturated markets. None of these political ads limned detailed plans for our country's future. Apart from the few that presented a candidate's fuzzy \"vision\" for future prosperity and freedom, the rest sliced and diced opponents, leaving an observant visitor from Mars to conclude that the only people who run for office in the United States are mountebanks, schemers, time-servers, liars, fakers, traitors, quacks, and crooks. Every opinion poll shows that the public heartily dislikes political attack ads; and baleful commentators ceaselessly lament the damage to democracy done by the steady diet of bile that campaigns feed the electorate. Yet many of those who create the ads take a different view. \"Negative ads not only work, they give voters better information than positive ads,\" declared one political consultant a few years back. Affirmed another: \"competitive, comparative, compelling ads ... provide voters with the mothers' milk of political decision-making: information.\" This sentiment is widely shared in the consulting profession. Are voters perhaps disgruntled with what in fact is good for them? That's what one political scientist believes. John Geer, in his 2006 book, In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns, set out to establish empirically whether negative ads hurt or helped the electoral process. He restricted his investigation to 795 television ads run in presidential races from 1960 to 2000, copies of which are readily accessible in a couple of repositories. After coding these ads for content and type, Geer concluded that * Negative ads have always outpaced positive ads by ratios ranging from 3 to 1 in 1984 to 20 to 1 in 2000. The average is about 8 to 1. * There is a clear upward trend in negativity since 1960. * Negative ads, contrary to received wisdom, enhance the democratic process by creating a more information-rich environment. The last of these conclusions is the most interesting and provocative. How did Geer arrive at it? His argument involved several stages. First, Geer postulated an \"asymmetry\" between positive and negative ads. \"[F]or the negative ad to be effective, the sponsor ... must marshal more evidence\" [than the sponsor of a positive ad]. \"[W]hen politicians present negative messages, they need to provide evidence to make them credible.\" Geer then tested this postulate against the data. He examined the 795 ads to see if they included evidence. Geer's findings supported his postulate: \"In every year under study, negative ads were much more likely to provide clear evidence to support their point than positive ads.\" Second","PeriodicalId":82464,"journal":{"name":"Report from the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy","volume":"31 1","pages":"13-18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66669176","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Woman Who Fell in Love with the Man Who Thought the World Was Flat Public Policy, Identity, and the Challenge of Reconceptualizing Domestic Violence in the Latino Community","authors":"M. Fornerino","doi":"10.13021/G8pppq.312013.187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13021/G8pppq.312013.187","url":null,"abstract":"Almost as Often as the Earth Turns The story I am about to tell should have taken place during medieval times, but instead, it takes place in the twenty-first century. Perhaps it could best be described as a Latino version of a tale about a knight-errant and his damsel, a tragic fairy-tale-in-the-making that has as its protagonists an undocumented Mexican couple - a man and a woman who ventured to an unknown land, like so many others, looking for work and the promise of a better future. I was a witness to this story before I became its narrator, and as such, I was struck by the ties that reach out across history, repeating the same tales again and again. The lovers and travelers, then and now, searching for hope and facing great obstacles, and even violence, along the way. This much is enough to tie us to the past, to tie fiction to reality. But there is more. For one of the most remarkable and surprising things that I discovered was that the modern caballero I knew, like the medieval cavalier I could only imagine, was utterly sure that the world is flat. I discovered this fact while walking along Main Street in a small town somewhere in the American Midwest. I was making my way back to my office with our \"hero\" and his doncella (from now on, \"Pedro\" and \"Isabel\"), talking to them about their hometown. (1) It was a time during which that city found itself at the center of international news due to a high intensity earthquake that had just hit, causing major damage and loss of life. \"It's amazing how quickly we learn of events happening in places so far away these days,\" I commented, \"but I suppose that's the nature of technology: news travels around the globe in no time.\" To my surprise, Pedro reacted with confusion and disbelief - not to the claim that news travels quickly, but to the claim that it travels \"around a globe.\" Isabel proceeded to explain to an incredulous Pedro that the world was, indeed, round. She enunciated the word \"round,\" or redondo in Spanish, in such a beautiful and musical way that there was no doubt what she meant to convey, how she meant to insist on the idea of the roundness of the world. I also felt compelled to add that the Earth turned on its axis and, further, revolved around the sun. The cosmos is about curves and ellipses, never about flat surfaces and straight lines. Pedro listened for a while, looking at us condescendingly, apparently feeling sorry for us. After all, we were women, and by definition we were not capable of knowing more than he did. The conversation continued for a while, with stories of Columbus and Copernicus, explorers and scientists, discoveries and celebrations; but Pedro remained silent, unconvinced, and always smiling as if to indicate his disdain. I changed the topic and kept walking, sensing that we were not going to change Pedro's mind in the first round. We made our way through the summer air, and I thought of the seasons. I thought of the beauty of the way it all unfolds, spinning and ","PeriodicalId":82464,"journal":{"name":"Report from the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy","volume":"31 1","pages":"2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66669560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly Volume 31, Numbers 3-4 (Fall/Winter 2013)","authors":"D. Lévine, J. Lichtenberg, R. Nelson, M. Sagoff","doi":"10.13021/G8PPPQ.312013.464","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13021/G8PPPQ.312013.464","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":82464,"journal":{"name":"Report from the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy","volume":"31 1","pages":"1-36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66669540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Is “Human Being” a Moral Concept?","authors":"D. Maclean","doi":"10.13021/G8PPPQ.302010.90","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13021/G8PPPQ.302010.90","url":null,"abstract":"Is “human being” a moral concept? I believe it is, which makes me a speciesist. Speciesism violates a moral principle of equality. Peter Singer defines it as “a prejudice or attitude of bias toward the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species.” He compares it to racism. My goal in this essay is to defend a speciesist attitude or outlook on morality.","PeriodicalId":82464,"journal":{"name":"Report from the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy","volume":"30 1","pages":"16-20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66669045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Targeting Civilian Infrastructure with Smart Bombs: The New Permissiveness","authors":"J. Segal","doi":"10.13021/G8PPPQ.302010.101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13021/G8PPPQ.302010.101","url":null,"abstract":"Common sense would suggest that the acquisition of precision-guided munitions should make it easier to avoid collateral damage in war. But U.S. military theorists have drawn the opposite conclusion: namely, that the more precise the weapon, the more permissive the standard for targeting should be. Henry Shue explains why this has happenedand why it is factually mistaken and morally misguided.","PeriodicalId":82464,"journal":{"name":"Report from the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy","volume":"30 1","pages":"2-7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43888378","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Philosophical Foundations of Civic Education","authors":"P. Levine, A. Higgins‐D'alessandro","doi":"10.13021/G8PPPQ.302010.91","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13021/G8PPPQ.302010.91","url":null,"abstract":"Those who study and evaluate civic education programs are often reticent about their values or unsure how to defend them. Peter Levine and Ann Higgins-DAlessandro offer a range of philosophical resources for thinking about the values that society should hold and how it should try to transmit these values through civic education to future generations.","PeriodicalId":82464,"journal":{"name":"Report from the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy","volume":"30 1","pages":"21-27"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66668700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Poverty of Economic Reasoning about Climate Change","authors":"M. Sagoff","doi":"10.13021/G8PPPQ.302010.89","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13021/G8PPPQ.302010.89","url":null,"abstract":"A New Yorker cartoon illustrates the intergenerational aspect of climate change. It shows an Eskimo mother, father, and young child as they wave a tearful farewell to an old man, presumably a grandparent, whom they have placed on an ice floe. The family itself stands on a floating piece of ice. Which generation is responsible for the plight of which? I want to argue that the intergenerational aspect of climate change makes economic reasoning about it more problematic than one might think. Economic analysis depends on the idea of trade or exchange. It is hard to see, therefore, how it applies to our relations to people in the further future. We cannot bargain with them or they with us. Since they do not yet exist, they cannot have property rights. If ability to pay is a prerequisite of willingness to pay (WTP), moreover, then future generations cannot be willing--because they are not able--to pay us anything. We have exhausted all possible \"benefits of trade\" with them. I shall argue that the passivity of future generations--their inability to exercise market or political power--makes economic analysis irrelevant not just to justifying the goals of climate policy but also to designing instruments to achieve those goals. Economists often recommend that an international authority \"cap\" global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but allow firms to trade \"allowances\" under that cap. I shall argue that such a regime cannot succeed because generations in the further future, who are its principal beneficiaries, are in no position to defend it. Trading in GHG \"allowances,\" as I shall argue, is more likely to reflect beliefs about the likelihood of enforcement--bets placed on election returns, for example--than to reveal the marginal cost of \"sustainable\" production or \"clean\" energy technology. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A perfectly efficient or competitive market cannot respond to the need of future generations for a stable climate because future generations play no role as market actors. An efficient policy therefore cannot be a sustainable policy. This is an argument against efficiency, not against sustainability. That economic theory fails in this way suggests we must rely on other reasons and rationales to justify a response to the threat of climate change. Climate Change Is Not a Collective Action Problem According to Paul G. Harris, \"Climate change is a collective action problem par excellence.\" One can see the appeal of this analysis. In 1965, Mancur Olson in The Logic of Collective Action showed that when each individual acts on self-interest, for example, to \"free-ride\" on the more socially motivated action of others, public goods will not be produced. Olson defines a \"group\" as \"a number of individuals with a common interest.\" Olson wrote, \"Unless the number of individuals in a group is quite small, or unless there is coercion or some other special device to make individuals act in their common interest, rational, self-interested individuals will not ac","PeriodicalId":82464,"journal":{"name":"Report from the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy","volume":"22 1","pages":"8-15"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66668971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Conscience of a Prosecutor","authors":"D. Luban","doi":"10.13021/G8PPPQ.302010.100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13021/G8PPPQ.302010.100","url":null,"abstract":"This essay, a version of the 2010 Tabor Lecture at Valparaiso Law School, examines issues about the role of a prosecutor in the adversary system through the lens of the following question: Should a prosecutor throw a case to avoid keeping men who he thinks are innocent in prison? This issue came to prominence in 2008, when Daniel Bibb, a New York City prosecutor, told newspaper reporters that he had done so in connection with a 1991 murder conviction that he had been assigned to reinvestigate after new evidence emerged that the wrong men had been convicted and were serving lengthy sentences. Bibb’s superiors required him (over his protests) to defend the convictions in a hearing to determine if the men should be retried. He had exhaustively reinvestigated the case, including interviews with reluctant witnesses who it seemed unlikely that anyone but Bibb could get to testify. This essay delves into the facts of the case and includes interview material with Daniel Bibb. It defends Bibb’s conduct, and argues that rather than facing professional discipline (as some ethics experts suggested), Bibb deserves praise. The essay uses the episode to examine the meaning of familiar adage that prosecutors must seek justice, not victory; the question of whether a subordinate lawyer in an organization must defer to the judgment of his or her superiors; and the role of conscience in legal ethics.","PeriodicalId":82464,"journal":{"name":"Report from the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy","volume":"30 1","pages":"8-13"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66669056","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}