Against Global Egalitarianism

This article attacks the view that global justice should be understood in terms of a global principle of equality. The principle mainly discussed is global equality of opportunity – the idea that people of similar talent and motivation should have equivalent opportunity sets no matter to which society they belong. I argue first that in a culturally plural world we have no neutral way of measuring opportunity sets. I then suggest that the most commonly offered defences of global egalitarianism – the cosmopolitan claim that human lives have equal value, the argument that a persons nationality is a morally arbitrary characteristic, and the more empirical claim that relationships among fellow-nationals are no longer special in a way that matters for justice – are all defective. If we fall back on the idea of equality as a default principle, then we have to recognize that pursuing global equality of opportunity systematically would leave no space for national self-determination. Finally, I ask whether global inequality might be objectionable for reasons independent of justice, and argue that the main reason for concern is the inequalities of power that are likely to emerge in a radically unequal world.I am very grateful to Gillian Brock and Kok-Chor Tan for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.     

Reasonable Impartiality and Priority for Compatriots. A Criticism of Liberal Nationalism’s Main flaws

Distinguishing between reasonable partiality and reasonable impartiality makes a difference in resolving the serious clashes between priority for compatriots versus cosmopolitan global duties. Defenders of a priority for compatriots have to acknowledge two strong moral constraints: states have to fulfil all their special, domestic and trans-domestic duties, and associative duties are limited by distributive constraints resulting from the moral duty to fight poverty and gross global inequalities. In the recent global context, I see four main problems for liberal-nationalist defenders of priority for compatriots: (i) Reasonable particularists often forget that associative duties for compatriots compete with many sub-national and trans-domestic associative duties. (ii) They tend to forget that associative national duties compete with other, strong special (contractual, reparative) obligations regarding not only citizens and residents inside nation-states but also trans-domestic obligations across state borders. (iii) They do not properly discuss the problem of unallocated duties in addressing global poverty and insecurity. (iv) The design of supra-national and global mediating institutions, and the crafting of policies to remedy the misallocation of duties and to coordinate the required state activities is an urgent task neglected by liberal nationalists. In the recent context, reasonable partialitys bias towards partiality is most unwelcome and morally dubious. Reasonable impartialitys bias towards cosmopolitanism helps to stimulate a drastic shift in obligations and stimulates productive trans-national institutional design.     

Subjective Well-Being and Kahneman’s ‘Objective Happiness’

This paper is an attempt to clarify the relation between, on the one hand, the construct of ‘objective happiness’ recently proposed by Daniel Kahneman and, on the other hand, the principal focus of happiness studies, namely subjective well-being (SWB). I have two aims. The first, a critical one, is to give a theoretical explanation for why ‘objective happiness’ cannot be a general measure of SWB. Kahneman’s methodology precludes incorporation of relevant pieces of information that can become available to the subject only retrospectively. The second aim, a constructive one, is to clarify the exact connection between ‘objective happiness’ and the wider notion of SWB. Unlike Kahneman, who treats the notion as a useful first approximation, I propose that its applicability should be thought of as context-dependent: under some conditions it could be the right measure of SWB but what these conditions are involves both psychological and ethical considerations.     

Transfer to intermediate forms following concept discrimination by pigeons: chimeras and morphs

Two experiments examined pigeons' generalization to intermediate forms following training of concept discriminations. In Experiment 1, the training stimuli were sets of images of dogs and cats, and the transfer stimuli were head/body chimeras, which humans tend to categorize more readily in terms of the head part rather than the body part. In Experiment 2, the training stimuli were sets of images of heads of dogs and cats, and the intermediate stimuli were computer-generated morphs. In both experiments, pigeons learned the concept discrimination quickly and generalized with some decrement to novel instances of the categories. In both experiments, transfer tests were carried out with intermediate forms generated from both familiar and novel exemplars of the training sets. In Experiment 1, the pigeons' transfer performance, unlike that of human infants exposed to similar stimuli, was best predicted by the body part of the stimulus when the chimeras were formed from familiar exemplars. Spatial frequency analysis of the stimuli showed that the body parts were richer in high spatial frequencies than the head parts, so these data are consistent with the hypothesis that categorization is more dependent on local stimulus features in pigeons than in humans. There was no corresponding trend when the chimeras were formed from novel exemplars. In Experiment 2, when morphs of training stimuli were used, response rates declined smoothly as the proportion of the morph contributed by the positive stimulus fell, although results with morphs of novel stimuli were again less orderly.     

Responsibility for Global Health

There are several reasons for the current prominence of global health issues. Among the most important is the growing awareness that some risks to health are global in scope and can only be countered by global cooperation. In addition, human rights discourse and, more generally, the articulation of a coherent cosmopolitan ethical perspective that acknowledges the importance of all persons, regardless of where they live, provide a normative basis for taking global health seriously as a moral issue. In this paper we begin the task of translating the vague commitment to doing something to improve global health into a coherent set of more determinate obligations. One chief conclusion of our inquiry is that the responsibilities of states regarding global health are both more determinate and more extensive than is usually assumed. We also argue, however, that institutional innovation will be needed to achieve a more comprehensive, fair distribution of concrete responsibilities regarding global health and to provide effective mechanisms for holding various state and nonstate actors accountable for fulfilling them.     

Age, memory load, and individual differences in working memory as determinants of class-inclusion reasoning.

We studied the effects of individual differences in speak-span scores and variations in memory demands on the class-inclusion performance of 10-, 13-, and 15-year-old children. The speak-span task was an age-appropriate modification of Daneman and Carpenter's (1980) reading-span task and was considered to be a measure of global resources. The age variable was assumed to be a global index of skill development, and some of the specific skills hypothesized to be important in class-inclusion reasoning were estimated using a mathematical model. The results from both regression analyses and the mathematical model indicated that differences in age, speak span, and memory load all affected performance. Surprisingly, the effects of speak span and memory load were independent. However, the effects of each of these variables depended on the age level of the participants. Based on these findings, we argued that (a) resources vary continuously with age, (b) both skill level and global resources should be varied in developmental studies of problem solving, and (c) resource theories (e.g., Norman & Shallice, 1986) should be modified to account for developmental change.     

Do multicultural experiences facilitate global processing style?

The current research explores whether multicultural experiences facilitate global processing style. We conducted two experiments in which participants were exposed to either a multicultural experience or a monocultural experience. They were required to either perform the Navon letter task (Experiment 1) or search for similarities or differences between two videos (Experiment 2). The experimental results showed that, compared to the participants exposed to a monocultural experience, those exposed to a multicultural experience had faster reaction times to global letters (Experiment 1) and tended to search for similarities (Experiment 2). This indicates that individuals with multicultural experiences facilitate a global processing style. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd, Asian Association of Social Psychology and Beijing Normal University