Abortion Policy and the Market

2003 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-98
Author(s):  
John M. Cobin ◽  

The only true scarce resource is the human mind. Yet abortion is perhaps the most potent enemy of the human mind, since it destroys the one thing in life that cannot be replaced. Ecmomic analysis suggests that abortion policy will fail to serve the public iruerest due to public choice and knowledge problems, and it will adversely distort beneficial market phenomena like adoption services. Even if markets fail to produce zero unwanted pregnancies, it is not clear that abortion policy has avoided more tragic government failures. Theologians argue that killing innocent human beings is moral turpitude, since an irreplaceable soul is lost. But abortion is also a huge social loss in an economic sense. Society loses from legalized abortion by losing a mind and from the social costs that devolve from destroying that mind. Hence, classical liberals should embrace the recent pro-life momentum.

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Tuncay Şur ◽  
Betül Yarar

This paper seeks to understand why there has been an increase in photographic images exposing military violence or displaying bodies killed by military forces and how they can freely circulate in the public without being censored or kept hidden. In other words, it aims to analyze this particular issue as a symptom of the emergence of new wars and a new regime of their visual representation. Within this framework, it attempts to relate two kinds of literature that are namely the history of war and war photography with the bridge of theoretical discussions on the real, its photographic representation, power, and violence.  Rather than systematic empirical analysis, the paper is based on a theoretical attempt which is reflected on some socio-political observations in the Middle East where there has been ongoing wars or new wars. The core discussion of the paper is supported by a brief analysis of some illustrative photographic images that are served through the social media under the circumstances of war for instance in Turkey between Turkish military troops and the Kurdish militants. The paper concludes that in line with the process of dissolution/transformation of the old nation-state formations and globalization, the mechanism and mode of power have also transformed to the extent that it resulted in the emergence of new wars. This is one dynamic that we need to recognize in relation to the above-mentioned question, the other is the impact of social media in not only delivering but also receiving war photographies. Today these changes have led the emergence of new machinery of power in which the old modern visual/photographic techniques of representing wars without human beings, torture, and violence through censorship began to be employed alongside medieval power techniques of a visual exhibition of tortures and violence.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steffen Dalsgaard

This article refers to carbon valuation as the practice of ascribing value to, and assessing the value of, actions and objects in terms of carbon emissions. Due to the pervasiveness of carbon emissions in the actions and objects of everyday lives of human beings, the making of carbon offsets and credits offers almost unlimited repertoires of alternatives to be included in contemporary carbon valuation schemes. Consequently, the article unpacks how discussions of carbon valuation are interpreted through different registers of alternatives - as the commensuration and substitution of variants on the one hand, and the confrontational comparison of radical difference on the other. Through the reading of a wide selection of the social science literature on carbon markets and trading, the article argues that the value of carbon emissions itself depends on the construction of alternative, hypothetical scenarios, and that emissions have become both a moral and a virtual measure pitting diverse forms of actualised actions or objects against each other or against corresponding nonactions and non-objects as alternatives.


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-278
Author(s):  
Torjus Midtgarden

Charles Peirce’s classification of the sciences was designed shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. The classification has two main sources of inspiration: Comte’s science classification and Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Peirce’s classification, like that of Comte, is hierarchically organised in that the more general and abstract sciences provide principles for the less general and more concrete sciences. However, Peirce includes and assigns a superordinate role to philosophical disciplines which analyse and provide logical, methodological and ontological principles for the specialised sciences, and which are based on everyday life experience. Moreover, Peirce recognises two main branches of specialised empirical science: the natural sciences, on the one hand, and the social sciences, the humanities and psychology on the other. While both branches share logical and methodological principles, they are based on different ontological principles in studying physical nature and the human mind and its products, respectively. Peirce’s most basic philosophical discipline, phenomenology, transforms his early engagement with Kant. Peirce’s classification of aesthetics, ethics and logic as normative sub-disciplines of philosophy relate to his philosophical pragmatism. Yet his more overarching division between theoretical (philosophical and specialised) sciences and practical sciences may be seen as problematic. Taking Peirce’s historical account of scientific developments into consideration, however, I argue that his science classification and its emphasis on the interdependencies between the sciences could be seen as sustaining and supporting interdisciplinarity and interaction across fields of research, even across the divide between theoretical and practical sciences.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 125-144
Author(s):  
Jesús Víctor Alfredo Contreras Ugarte

Summary: Reflecting on the role humans take into nowadays society, should be of interest in all our social reflections, even for those that refer to the field of law. Any human indifferent and unconscious of the social role that he ought to play within society, as a member of it, is an irresponsible human detached from everything that surrounds him, regarding matters and other humans. Trying to isolate in an irresponsible, passive and comfortable attitude, means, after all, denying oneself, denying our nature, as the social being every human is. This is the reflection that this academic work entitles, the one made from the point of view of the Italian philosopher Rodolfo Mondolfo. From a descriptive development, starting from this renowned author, I will develop ideas that will warn the importance that human protagonism have, in this human product so call society. From a descriptive development, from this well-known author, I will be prescribing ideas that will warn the importance of the protagonism that all human beings have, in that human product that we call society. I have used the descriptive method to approach the positions of the Italian humanist philosopher and, for my assessments, I have used the prescriptive method from an eminently critical and deductive procedural position. My goal is to demonstrate, from the humanist postulates of Rodolfo Mondolfo, the hypothesis about the leading, decision-making and determining role that the human being has within society. I understand, to have reached the demonstration of the aforementioned hypothesis, because, after the analyzed, there is no doubt, that the human being is not one more existence in the development of societies; its role is decisive in determining the human present and the future that will house the next societies and generations of our historical future.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaan Valsiner

Jaan Valsiner shows how human beings create cognitive and affective orders through constructions of meaning that allow them to move safely in highly complex situations and environments. He sees the human being as an “animal symbolicum” with performative needs and driven by the desire to communicate. He shows how processes of interpretation, understanding and ordering are structured and how a combination of approaches from social anthropology, semiotics, cultural psychology and psychoanalysis can contribute to a more appropriate representation of these processes and their functions. The Hans Kilian Award for the Research and Promotion of Metacultural Humanisation honours excellent achievements in interdisciplinary research and teaching in the social and cultural sciences. In addition to the keynote speech by cultural psychologist Jaan Valsiner in English, there is a foreword by Heinz-Rudi Spiegel, chairman of the board of trustees for the Hans Kilian Award, and a laudatio by Pradeep Chakkarath, co-director of the Hans Kilian and Lotte Köhler Centre for Social and Cultural Psychology and Historical Anthropology.


Author(s):  
Katja Garloff

This chapter jumps to the turn of the century, when the rise of racial antisemitism fostered a new Jewish self-awareness and rendered “interracial” love and marriage central to the public debates about German Jewish identity. It analyzes three German Jewish writers of different and paradigmatic political orientations, who used love stories to diagnose the reasons for the faltering of emancipation: the assimilationist Ludwig Jacobowski, the Zionist Max Nordau, and the mainstream liberal Georg Hermann. Their works, including Jacobowski's Werther the Jew (1892), Nordau's Doctor Kohn (1899), and Hermann's Jettchen Gebert (1906), show how love stories potentially escape the ideological constraints of increasingly racialized models of identity. On the one hand, the love plot affords an opportunity to expose the obstacles encountered by Jews seeking integration in times of rising antisemitism. On the other hand, the open endings of most love stories and the ambiguous use of racial language allow the authors to eschew a final verdict on the success or failure of integration. The chapter argues that the love plot generates a host of equivocations between the social and the biological, and the particular and the universal, creating a metaphorical surplus that opens up venues to rethink the project of Jewish emancipation and assimilation.


Karl Barth ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 61-83
Author(s):  
Christiane Tietz

The social circumstances in Barth’s new parish in Safenwil were shaped by the poor working conditions at the town’s two textile factories. Barth soon took public positions on behalf of the workers, what led to the public accusation of a “red Messiah”. He was convinced of the continuity between Jesus’s teachings and the goals of social democracy, becoming a member of the Swiss Socialist Party. During these years Barth’s friendship with Eduard Thurneysen deepened and their joint theological work began. Barth got to know Hermann Kutter and Leonhard Ragaz, the important Swiss religious socialists. The First World War and the support for that war among German theologians, including several of his professors, was a decisive turning point, leading Barth to conclude theologically that human beings should not identify any human cause with God’s will. In 1913, Barth married Nelly Hoffmann. During their time in Safenwil, they had four children.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 610-627
Author(s):  
Oren Ergas

This paper locates the main challenge for education in cosmopolitanism within the nature of education when interpreted as a “mind-making process.” Based on this interpretation, education is currently a process that shapes non-cosmopolitan minds, for the practices generally associated with it habituate the human mind to see “reality” through contingent social narratives. The aspiration of education in cosmopolitanism to cultivate “a sense of feeling at home and caring for the world,” requires practices that also liberate the mind from the contingencies of the social narratives into which it happens to be born. For such purpose, education requires an ethical meta-narrative, which applies to all human beings and appeals to a mutual human language. Following calls for embracing a pluralistic epistemology in policy making, this paper proposes the interdisciplinary field of contemplative studies that focuses on the understanding of the embodied mind, as a point of origin for considering education as such and education in cosmopolitanism in particular. Mindfulness is then interpreted as one possible practical pedagogy based on which we can practice detachment from the contingency of social narratives by cultivating grounded-ness in the non-contingency of pre-conceptual embodied first-person experience.


2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (10) ◽  
pp. 2025-2053
Author(s):  
Markus Wohlfeil ◽  
Anthony Patterson ◽  
Stephen J. Gould

Purpose This paper aims to explain a celebrity’s deep resonance with consumers by unpacking the individual constituents of a celebrity’s polysemic appeal. While celebrities are traditionally theorised as unidimensional semiotic receptacles of cultural meaning, the authors conceptualise them here instead as human beings/performers with a multi-constitutional, polysemic consumer appeal. Design/methodology/approach Supporting evidence is drawn from autoethnographic data collected over a total period of 25 months and structured through a hermeneutic analysis. Findings In rehumanising the celebrity, the study finds that each celebrity offers the individual consumer a unique and very personal parasocial appeal as the performer, the private person behind the public performer, the tangible manifestation of either through products and the social link to other consumers. The stronger these constituents, individually or symbiotically, appeal to the consumer’s personal desires, the more s/he feels emotionally attached to this particular celebrity. Research limitations/implications Although using autoethnography means that the breadth of collected data is limited, the depth of insight this approach garners sufficiently unpacks the polysemic appeal of celebrities to consumers. Practical implications The findings encourage talent agents, publicists and marketing managers to reconsider underlying assumptions in their talent management and/or celebrity endorsement practices. Originality/value While prior research on celebrity appeal has tended to enshrine celebrities in a “dehumanised” structuralist semiosis, which erases the very idea of individualised consumer meanings, this paper reveals the multi-constitutional polysemy of any particular celebrity’s personal appeal as a performer and human being to any particular consumer.


1935 ◽  
Vol 81 (334) ◽  
pp. 489-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ella Pratt Yule

The social behaviour which is the material of psychological observation at any given time is the product of a certain genetic constitution on the one hand, and of a complex process of social, educational, familial and, to some extent, uterine environment on the other. The social behaviour of human beings cannot be subjected to direct methods of genetic analysis. The genetic psychologist may be compared to the astronomer, in so far as he has to rely on Nature to perform the experiments which he himself is unable to undertake. To the category of such experiments belongs the phenomenon of twin production. In the production of monozygotic twins Nature provides us with individuals of the same genetic constitution. Such differences as they exhibit arise uniquely from the operation of differences in the environment in which they are placed. In ordinary circumstances they share many more features of environment than any other two individuals selected at random from the population. When reared together, the extent of their dissimilarity can only throw light on such differences of nurture as may operate on members of the same family unit and of the same age. If they are reared apart, the measure of resemblance exhibited by monozygotic twins may throw light on the influence of social environment in a less restricted sense. With a sufficiently large sample of twins reared apart, a satisfactory standard of comparison for assessing the extent of resemblance due to genetic constitution, plus the effects of a common uterine environment, would be provided by the degree of resemblance existing between their foster sibs in families into which they have been adopted. Such data cannot be collected easily. As yet they do not exist in sufficient quantity to yield satisfactory conclusions.


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