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1.
A fantasy about the future might show a world in which the human-centered ethics that now directs the moral and political behavior of most of the people of the industrially powerful democracies has come to dominate the moral thinking of everyone on Earth. This ethics is grounded in a priori principles which, in all cases of conflict or competition, give vital human needs and interests priority over those of every other living thing. The end point of this step-by-step process of preference is the breakdown of the self-sustaining biosystem which nature has perfected. But any ethics is absurd if its practice would cause the breakdown of the biosystem which sustains civilized life. It must be revised or discarded. A new model with an empirical method must replace the old, a priori, human-centered ethics. The new model would treat ethical theories as theories about how people can live in the physical world. When so conceived, a theory of ethics would be confirmed or refuted by the harm or benefit that results when it guides individual and societal behavior. Negatively a theory is mistaken and must be rejected if its practice would jeopardize the health or stability of the Earth's biosystem. Positively and secondarily, it must enable people to satisfy a coherent mix of their conflicting needs and interests. Such an ethics can never be final. Like the theories of science, an ethical theory is always subject to correction as people discard their mistakes and substitute revised theories that work better—that better meet the negative and positive conditions of an acceptable ethical theory.  相似文献   

2.
This essay reflects on one dimension of the challenge of being a queer ethicist. Can we have norms/values without liberal assumptions that might undo the important contributions of queer theory? The reemergence of appeals to "citizenship" in lbgt and queer debates serves as illustrations of this question. Reading Weeks's Invented Moralities: Sexual Values in an Age of Uncertainty(1995), while considering various scholars who have engaged the issue of sexual citizenship since, enables me to illustrate some of the issues that emerge around ethics and queerness at this particular moment. My argument is that attempts to offer constructive ethical engagement in the end often contain challenges rather than successfully address them. Critically examining Weeks's intervention into what he sees as our "loss" of moral authority and ethical concerns to the right wing is helpful for queer ethical conversations that consider available theoretical and philosophical models of claiming citizenship as a way of claiming values in uncertain times. Weeks (1995; 1998), Richardson (2000), Bell and Binnie (2000), and Phelan (2001) provides helpful guides to the struggle with tensions that faces us in lbgt/queer debates of citizenship.  相似文献   

3.
This paper discusses how fishing communities around the world avoid destructive overfishing through local and largely informal self-management. The paper offers many examples that undermine the widespread assumption that the tragedy of the commons is inevitable without government regulation.  相似文献   

4.
Just as we have a turn around manager to save a failing business organization, so it is held, we need a turn around perspective to retrieve the Earth from being in a deficit position. Hence the paradoxical emphasis upon the Earth as the business of the future. Two important distinctions are offered which together provide a new frame of reference for bonding the human and the Earth. The initiating event for the first distinction was a business conference whose purpose was to explore the emerging domain of ego energy. In a parallel way, it is proposed we explore the yet to be discovered domain of eco energy. With eco energy we open our narrowed human window to cosmic perception. With cosmic perception, the energy of the universe can flow through us. The second distinction is between looking at and seeing. Looking at refers to treating our world as a collection of objects. As a collection of objects the Earth can be processed as a series of business transactions. With seeing we relate to our world as a communion of subjects. Such seeing offers transforming power for the human and the Earth to engage in the dialogue of powerful listening and speaking on both individual and planetary scale. These two sets of distinctions are sounded like echo chambers against ten ecologically guiding statements. These ten guiding statements become a reality-testing, experiential framework. Such a turn around perspective offers a different vision to be operationalized in our individual, community, and business lives. Then we can see clearly and respond with eco energy to the Earth, the business of the future!  相似文献   

5.
This paper deals with a full range of sexual and reproductive behaviors among different tribes of Gypsies in Serbia. The examined traits include rates of fertility, mortality, age distribution, education, crime rates, and parental care. In addition, Gypsy traditions of culturally prescribed sexual behavior are also studied. It is found that Gypsy tribes employ different reproductive strategies, ranging from an extreme, for humans, r (reproductive) strategy to a more typical K (parental) strategy. The reasons bringing about these differences come from the Gypsies' readiness to adjust their behavior and reproduction in order to create the most favorable strategy in a given environment. This paper elucidates and contrasts the more typical r-selected Gypsies with a group of K-selected Gypsies living in a Serbian village.  相似文献   

6.
A recent, rather typical, essay argues that even if the greenhouse threat is real, even if temperatures rise and low-lying lands must be protected forever by an enormous system of dikes, such unlikely occurrences do not justify imposing vast costs on the present generation rather than helping developing countries overcome the environmental problems that they are facing today. This review shows that anyone willing to cross disciplinary boundaries, or willing to listen to scholars who have taken this less-traveled road, can easily ascertain that this surprisingly popular viewpoint is mistaken. This review's interdisciplinary journey begins with an exposition of a few fundamental, noncontroversial, ecological insights. These are followed by a brief case study in environmental history: the CFC-ozone link. The natural greenhouse effect is then introduced, relying for the most part on comparative astronomical data and insights. The nature of, evidence for, and the largely uncertain consequences of, the enhanced greenhouse effect on Earth are taken up next. For argument's sake, a conservative and arbitrary estimate is adopted, assuming that the chances of adverse greenhouse consequences within the next century are 10%; of a cataclysm, 1%. Such chances, this review then conclusively shows, should not be taken, because there is no conceivable reason for taking them: the steps that will eliminate the greenhouse threat will also save money and cut pollution, accrue many other beneficial consequences, and only entail negligible negative consequences. Thus, a holistic review leads to the surprising conclusion that humanity is risking its future for less than nothing. Claims that the greenhouse controversy is legitimate, that it involves hard choices, that it is value-laden, or that it cannot be resolved by disinterested analysis, are tragically mistaken. Given the stakes of the greenhouse debate—the future of humanity—concerned scholars and citizens ought to understand this issue. This review provides an accessible, factual, holistic, and self-contained portrayal of the greenhouse threat.  相似文献   

7.
Social scientists are often concerned that research about the biological causes of behavior will encourage biologically-based public policy. Biosocial research models, jointly examining both social and biological causes of behavior, prevent simplistic biological thinking. Public policy is concerned with bringing about social change. Biological models of behavior primarily explain individual differences, and are not useful for guiding policies directed toward producing social change. When we allow our social ethics to prevent us from asking certain research questions, we will produce politically correct research results. We fall into such strategies because we imagine that ethics can be deduced from the nature of the world.  相似文献   

8.
Several criteria have evolved in law and tradition to constrain the delineation of Congressional and State and local legislative districts, such as population equality, geographic compactness, race/ethnic compactness, and integrity of political boundaries. Among the various criteria, I focus on compactness, and in particular, the legal and mensural aspects. Following the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, racial compactness has been employed more and more frequently as a primary criterion, and with reduced restraint compared with other criteria, except perhaps for population equality. In Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), the Supreme Court recognized racial/ethnic compactness and polarization in voting practices as prerequisites for newly established majority-minority districts. In Shaw v. Reno (1993), the Court reaffirmed the principle of geographic compactness as against racial compactness by noting that the shape of Cong. Dist. 12 of North Carolina was bizarre and that it was drawn solely on racial grounds. With this decision, race/ethnic compactness and, by extension, the broad interpretation of the Voting Rights Act have been put in conflict with geographic compactness as criteria. More recently, in Miller v. Johnson (1995), use of race as a predominant factor in district delineation, apart from compactness, was rejected. These developments should renew interest in and support for formal statistical guidelines in evaluating geographic compactness in redistricting plans. Many formulas for measuring compactness have been proposed and tested. Here the commonly used perimeter/circle measure and the circumscribed area/circle measure are compared by an examination of some simple geometric figures and 1990-Census-based C.D.'s. Some problems with these measures are noted, and a new measure, the CV/radii measure (the complement of the coefficient of variation of the radii of the district), is proposed and illustratively applied.  相似文献   

9.
Some scholars claim there is little variation in Chinese fertility because of coercive family planning policies. This research, however, demonstrates that other factors contribute to significant variation in fertility rates among China's 30 provinces/administrative divisions. Although family planning and socioeconomic development are found to explain significant amounts of variation in fertility for both the 1982 and 1990 census cross-sections, it was also found that gender equality in education had become significant by 1990. Path model results that lag the effects of 1982 socioeconomic development and gender equality in education also indicate that they both have sizable direct effects and moderate indirect effects through family planning behavior on 1990 fertility rates. Discussions include the possibility that the recent free market and institutional reforms, e.g., the decollectivization of agriculture, have contributed a social structure whereby many Chinese families have increased awareness of the opportunity costs associated with their reproductive decision making.  相似文献   

10.
The paper explores the constraints of an optimal regional policy, and itidentifies them through program indicators of city effect and overload.Based on a `programming approach to the regional analysis, and on the``optimal centrality' concept as meeting point of the city-effect andcity-overload curves, the paper outlines a core list of indicators ofcity-effect and overload, quantifying their dimensions (as findings ofresearch conducted for the European Commission, from 20 cities in 4countries of the EU: France, Germany, Italy and United Kingdom).Further, a ``strategy' for an appropriate urban-regionalreorganization, and for an appropriate `ambit of measuring urban lifequality, is outlined. And finally the misleading risks of comparisons inthe wrong spatial `ambit of data collecting about quality of life, arediscussed.  相似文献   

11.
The basic ideas underlying the analysis in this paper are that family size can be viewed as an economic life cycle decision and that there are decision trade-offs among fertility, consumption, and leisure. A micromodel of life cycle choice is developed and embedded in an economic-demographic macromodel. The macromodel is then used in a series of computer experiments to assess the effects on the population and the economy of changes in household preferences for children. The experiments include factual and counterfactual simulations of Canadian historical demographic experience and simulations of alternative future scenarios. The analysis and conclusions have general relevance for countries that have been through a fertility boom-and-bust sequence.We are grateful for the support received from Health and Welfare Canada's Review of Demography and Its Implications for Social and Economic Policy and from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We are grateful also to Christine H. Feaver, who carried out the computer-related aspects of the work on which this paper is based.  相似文献   

12.
During the 1990s, 23 states implemented family cap policies as a means to reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock births among welfare recipients. Using Current Population Survey data from 1989 to 1999, we examine the impact of family cap policies on the birth rates of single, less-educated women with children. We use the first five states that were granted waivers from the Department of Health and Human Services to implement family caps as natural experiments. Specifically, we compare trends in out-of-wedlock birth rates in Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, New Jersey and Virginia to trends in states that did not implement family caps or any other waivers prior to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. We employ several techniques to increase the credibility of results from our natural experiment, such as the inclusion of multiple comparison groups, controls for differential time trends, and difference-in-difference-in-differences estimators. Our regression estimates generally do not provide evidence that family cap policies reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock births among single, less-educated women with children.  相似文献   

13.
This paper proposes a simple method that analytically links the parameters and , which are not demographically interpretableand measurable in the Brass Relational Gompertz Fertility Model, with demographic measures of median age and interquartile range. We also extend the Brass model that deals only with age-specific fertility to age-parity-specific fertility, first marriage, divorce, remarriage, and leaving the parental home. The method has been successfully tested by fittings to 180 reliable observed demographic schedules in various countries and periods, and to nearly 10,000simulated schedules with various combinations of possible values (including the extremes) of and . Our proposed method that uses median age and interquartile range instead of and as input is useful in the population and family household projections. It releases the traditionalunrealistic assumption in population projections that the curve of the fertility schedule moves to the right or left in a parallel way. Instead, using our proposed method, one can assume that the demographic events would be delayed or advanced, while the curve becomes more spread or more concentrated, or, more specifically, assume that young people delay the events more than the older persons do, or vice versa. Our proposed method is also useful to formulate assumptions on future demographic trends for purposes of policy analysisand planning. It can be used to indirectly estimate demographic schedules when the detailed age-specific data are not currently available, which is useful for developing countries and sub-region studies in developed countries. A crucial point for a successful application of the method is that the standard schedule chosen can capture the general pattern of the demographic process in the population under study.  相似文献   

14.
Distinctive issues arise when a demographer must forecast enrollments in a context of court-ordered desegregation. The key issue studied here is whether magnet schools have strengthened a district's overall attractiveness to enrollees from outside or merely siphoned students away from other nonmagnet schools within the district, without any real districtwide enrollment gain. To clarify this issue, I analyze patterns of change in grade progression rates over several years as magnet schools were phased in at a large urban school district. Generally, magnet schools induced little actual gain, merely slowing the overall weakening of districtwide retention. These findings furnished an important reality check on the judgment for crafting appropriate forecasting assumptions and the resulting forecast proved reasonably accurate.  相似文献   

15.
This paper is concerned with the existence of temporary equilibria of migration with an overlapping generation structure and analyzes some of its properties. In the first part of the paper sufficient conditions for the existence of a temporary equilibrium of migration (in a given period) are given. In the second part some interesting properties of migration equilibria are analyzed. In particular the effects of differing degrees of information of the individuals on migration equilibria are investigated. Furthermore, it is shown that incomplete information alone suffices to induce migration flows even between countries that can be regarded as identical from an economic point of view.The paper was partly written during a research stay at the Sonderforschungsbereich 178 (University of Konstanz). Financial support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft is gratefully acknowledged. We wish to thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments.  相似文献   

16.
Genetic diagnosis and counselling have gone through a process of institutionalization and normalization, but ethical debates about the benefits and dangers of human genetics continue. This article adopts a sociology of science approach and asks how the professional authority of a science like human genetics, which is still a controversial field, is maintained. Using qualitative expert interviews, the article first identifies boundarywork strategies which provide information about specific ways in which claims to scientific competence and validity are succesfully asserted. At a second level, the boundary-drawing discourse of human genetics makes it possible to reach conclusions about the structuring of professional orientations to action. In order to dissociate human genetics from eugenic practices, the individual and the individual’s moral concepts are treated as the decisive point of reference for professional actions. In conclusion, the article criticizes the mistaken belief that this kind of denationalization (Entstaatlichung) and individualization of biopolitics (?life-politics“) is the same thing as a reflexive practice.  相似文献   

17.
The Earths surface has changed considerably over the past centuries. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1700s, humans from the Old World started to colonize the New World. The colonization processes lead to major changes in global land use and land cover. Large parts of the original land cover have been altered (e.g., deforestation), leading to extra emissions of GHGs to the atmosphere and enhancing global climate change. The spatial and temporal aspects are still not very well known. More and more global integrated environmental assessments concerning global sustainability require long time series of global change indicators, of which population is an important one. This study presents an update of the geo-referenced historical population maps for the period 1700–2000, part of the History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE), which can be used in integrated models of global change and/or global sustainability.  相似文献   

18.
This paper presents a typology and qualitative model of causation for use in assessing the relative contributions of population growth to problems of pollution, lost biodiversity, and natural resource depletion. Population growth is placed in context as one of eight key driving forces that shape environmental quality today. It is treated primarily as an impact amplifier, along with technology. Root causes are traced to paradigmatic beliefs—especially anthropocentrism and contempocentrism—which find expression in unsustainable consumption patterns and designs of political economy.  相似文献   

19.
Natives often fear labor market competition of foreigners, as they may induce declining wages and rising unemployment as in the case of natives and immigrants being substitutes. However, there is also the potential that they are complements, producing positive wage and employment effects. This issue is examined in a framework with two types of labor, such that low qualified native and immigrant workers (blue collar), although substitutes for one another, are potentially complements to high qualified native workers (white collar). This is thought to accurately reflect the past West German immigration experience. Examining the wage functions of white and blue collar natives in a random effects panel model using a vast sample of micro data, we actually find that foreigners negatively affect the wages of Germans on the whole. Relatively small gains are made by white collar employees with less than 20 years experience, but these are outweighed by the larger negative effects experienced by blue collar employees.We wish to thank Don DeVoretz, Riccardo Faini, Andrea Ichino, and participants at the following 1993 conferences for their valuable comments where drafts of this paper were presented: The Economics of International Migration: Econometric Evidence at the University of Konstanz, Internationale Migration und Arbeitsmarkt der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft fur Statistik und Volkswirtschaftslehre at the University of St. Gallen, Adjustment Policies in Previously Centrally Planned Economies: Which Lessons from Developing Countries Experiences at the University of Brescia, and Congress of the European Society for Population Economics in Budapest. Substantial revisions were made following the valuable suggestions of two anonymous referees and the special issue editor Wolfgang Franz, for which we are grateful.  相似文献   

20.
Using individual-level survey data that were collected in Russia in 1993, we analyze the fertility-employment relationship for a sample of urban women who bore children during the Soviet era. Although some Russian policy makers advocate policies that reduce female employment to stimulate fertility, we find little empirical support to ensure success of these policies. Specifically, we find no connection between employment and fertility for our sample of Russian females, perhaps because of their historic, mandated commitment to the labor market. Instead, we find that demographics and attitudes influence fertility decision making. These results, in combination with the findings that our sample of Russian women hold more traditional attitudes toward family and egalitarian attitudes toward work than similar American women, suggest that policies to stimulate fertility by reducing employment may not be effective for women raised during the Soviet era unless a dramatic shift in attitudes away from a strong work commitment also occurs.  相似文献   

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