Philosophy Commons^™

High Consumption And Global Justice, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Justice requires that high consumption in affluent societies be slowed down for the sake of eradicating extreme poverty in the developing world and improving the condition of its very moderate consumers. High consumption places environmental and resource burdens and restrictions on the economic growth options of developing countries without bringing commensurate benefits. Moreover, high consumers enjoy products made in less developed countries by workers who have inadequate wages and often labor in unhealthy and unsafe conditions.

Contemporary high consumption is characterized by a continuous raising of the standards of satisfactory spending. This process is visible in many American consumption patterns: …

Contextual Unanimity And The Units Of Selection Problem, Stuart M. Glennan

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Sober and Lewontin’s critique of genic selectionism is based upon the principle that a unit of selection should make a context‐independent contribution to fitness. Critics have effectively shown that this principle is flawed. In this paper I show that the context independence principle is an instance of a more general principle for characterizing causes,called the contextual unanimity principle. I argue that this latter principle, while widely accepted, is erroneous. What is needed is to replace the approach to causality characterized by the contextual unanimity criterion with an approach based on the concept of causal mechanism. After sketching such an approach, …

Beyond The Liberal Peace Project: Toward Peace With Justice, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Many contemporary liberals adhere to the "liberal peace project" (LPP) -- that is, the idea that world peace can be realized through the spread of political liberalism, or capitalist democracy. The LPP is based on projecting toward the future the well-documented fact that secure modern democracies have never fought wars with one another. A spirit of optimism prevails among LPP proponents, bolstered by the recent uprise in democracies, and they argue that their cause can be advanced by a liberal foreign policy that promotes free trade and human rights. I argue that the LPP is flawed by not recognizing that …

Review Of Alexander Kaufman, Welfare In The Kantian State (1999), Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Harry van der Linden's review of: Welfare in the Kantian State. By Alexander Kaufman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp.xii, 179. ISBN 0-19-829467-0 (cloth). £42.50, $45.00.