Democratizing Technology: Interests, Codes, Rights

This reply to criticism of Questioning Technology by Gerald Doppeltaddresses differences between political philosophy and philosophy oftechnology. While political philosophers such as Doppelt emphasize procedural aspects of democracy and equal rights, many philosophers of technologyimplicitly assume a substantive criterion of the good centered on thedevelopment of human capacities. Questioning Technology alsoemphasizes the diminishing agency of individuals in technologically advanced societies dominated by large scale organizations and themass media. These themes of social critique complement the main focusof political philosophy. Political philosophy must learn to addresstechnical issues as it has learned to address other social issuessuch as race and gender.     

Human Rights and the Challenges of Science and Technology

The expansion of the corpus of international human rights to include the right to water and sanitation has implications both for the process of recognizing human rights and for future developments in the relationships between technology, engineering and human rights. Concerns with threats to human rights resulting from developments in science and technology were expressed in the early days of the United Nations (UN), along with the recognition of the ambitious human right of everyone “to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications.” This comment explores the hypothesis that the emerging concepts most likely to follow recognition of the human right to water primarily involve issues of science and technology, such as access to medicines or clean and healthy environment. Many threats to human rights from advances in science, which were identified in the past as potential, have become real today, such as invasion of privacy from electronic recording, deprivation of health and livelihood as a result of climate change, or control over individual autonomy through advances in genetics and neuroscience. This comment concludes by urging greater engagement of scientists and engineers, in partnership with human rights specialists, in translating normative pronouncements into defining policy and planning interventions.     

传统渔业产权制度改造:进展与意外——舟山市螺门社区调查

海洋捕捞业在过去60多年间没有像农业那样加速增量发展,令人在直觉上怀疑国家施用于传统农业社会的产权制度改革不适用于改造渔业社会。本文研究舟山市螺门社区案例,认为问题要比想象的复杂很多。海洋捕捞业是靠海、靠船、靠技术与紧密合作的产业,大型捕捞船只天然具有产量优势;以大捕船为经营核算单位,天然需要超出绝大多数渔民家户资本水平的资本量、工作者的日常紧密合作、合乎民间公平尺度的分配,等等。当地在合作化时期改造传统的长元制而发展出大集体所有制下的、以捕船为核算单位的合作承包制,符合这些条件,因而长期支持了船只升级和平稳增产增收。1994年后的渔业生产徘徊衰落主要源于近海捕捞能力过剩而渔业资源衰退;政府就此采取激励渔民以个人、家庭为中心经营的新一轮股份制改革无法支持渔民转向外洋生产,反而瓦解了既有的大集体下合作承包制。所以,就渔业产权制度改革而言,并不存在脱离具体环境、生产要求和所需资本规模的、一包就灵一股份就灵的政策。同时,渔业组织产权制度还需要与渔业资源产权形成契配才能构成完整的渔业产权体系。改造渔业社会的产权制度要取得良好成效,一定需要注意和解决这两个问题。     

Demography and cultural complexity

Synthese - This paper begins by calling attention to a puzzling feature of our deep past: an apparent mis-match between morphological evolution in our lineage, including the expansion of our brain...     

Human Rights in the Perspective of Traditional Africa: A Cosmotheandric Approach

The notion of human rights is highly controversial and contested in modern scholarship. However, human rights have been defined as ‘the rational basis… for a justified demand.’ What constitutes demand should be understood as that which is different from favor or privilege but one's due, free from racial, religious, gender, political inclinations. But since rights are basic due to the fact that they are necessary for the enjoyment of something else, we are poised to examine it from the pre-figurative, configurative and post-figurative stages of development in Africa. This enterprise anchors on the belief in cosmotheandrisation of human rights in Africa: cosmos ‘earth’, theos ‘God’ and anthropos ‘human’. These three levels of horizontal and vertical relationship guarantee the respect for human rights in traditional Africa. Through this approach, this enterprise shows that the positive approach to human rights is majorly declarative without corresponding pragmatic manifestation.     

中医基本理论体系的重建与科学技术

中医学基本理论体系核心包括医学理论和古代朴素哲学思想,医哲不分造成的循环封闭体系阻碍了中医学对现代科学技术的吸收;在保持中医学基本特点的前提下,弱化古代哲学的影响,重建以人生命活动为根本、全面开放的学科体系,有利于中医学可持续发展。     

Demography, psychosocial factors, and emotional problems of Korean American adolescents

This study attempted to identify emotional problems and examine the related demographic and psychosocial factors of 340 Korean American adolescents in a major metropolitan area. Results revealed that lower GPA, longer length of residence in the United States, subjects' poor self-esteem, greater severity of conflict with parents, and poor relationships with peers were significant predictors of emotional problems. The findings could be beneficial for social work practitioners and educators in determining the service needs of Korean American adoelscents and designing interventions for their problems.     

中医基本理论体系的重建与科学技术

中医学基本理论体系核心包括医学理论和古代朴素哲学思想,医哲不分造成的循环封闭体系阻碍了中医学对现代科学技术的吸收;在保持中医学基本特点的前提下,弱化古代哲学的影响,重建以人生命活动为根本、全面开放的学科体系,有利于中医学可持续发展.     

Rights, Wrongs, and Aristotelian Egoism: Illuminating the Rights/Care Dichotomy

Since the recent work of Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, and others, it has become commonplace in moral philosophy to employ a dichotomy between an ethics of "Care" and an ethics of "Rights." Gilligan claims that men and women view moral issues in fundamentally divergent ways. Responses to moral problems tend to divide along lines emphasizing respect for rights, in the case of men, and caring for others, in the case of women. Inspired by these findings, several authors have classified moral theories in two basic camps, revolving around the injunction to care or the mandate to respect rights. While many concede that the Care and Rights perspectives are not mutually exclusive, it is increasingly common to view ethicists as forced to choose between these two types of theories.     

Rights,Duties and the Separateness of Persons

Let the fact of the separateness of persons be that we are separate individuals, each with his or her own life to lead. This is to be distinguished from the doctrine of the separateness of persons: the claim that the fact of our separateness is especially deep and important, morally speaking. In this paper, I argue that we ought to reject this doctrine. I focus most of my attention on the suggestion that the separateness of persons best explains the importance we attach to moral rights. After criticizing Nozick's use of the doctrine, I formulate an alternative account of the significance of rights. I then show how proponents of the doctrine of separateness have no principled way of distinguishing between egoism and moral libertarianism. I suggest that rejecting the doctrine of our separateness for the reasons I propose ensures that we need have no fear of having to embrace consequentialism as a result.     

Corporations,Rights, and Lobbying

While there may be several practical concerns regarding the practice of corporate lobbying of government officials, there is the more basic question of a corporation’s moral right to do so. I argue that group agents such as corporations have no moral rights, and thereby cannot have the right to lobby. There may be a basis for some legal rights for corporations, but I argue that lobbying cannot be one of the legal rights, even by reference to the rights of the individuals that make up the corporation. I end the paper by a discussion of how this argument applies to all private organizations, including public interest organizations.     

Rights, Liability, and the Moral Equality of Combatants

According to the dominant position in the just war tradition from Augustine to Anscombe and beyond, there is no ??moral equality of combatants.?? That is, on the traditional view the combatants participating in a justified war may kill their enemy combatants participating in an unjustified war??but not vice versa (barring certain qualifications). I shall argue here, however, that in the large number of wars (and in practically all modern wars) where the combatants on the justified side violate the rights of innocent people (??collateral damage??), these combatants are in fact liable to attack by the combatants on the unjustified side. I will support this view with a rights-based account of liability to attack and then defend it against a number of objections raised in particular by Jeff McMahan. The result is that the thesis of the moral equality of combatants holds good for a large range of armed conflicts while the opposing thesis is of very limited practical relevance.