Normative Judgment and Rational Requirements: A Reply to Ridge

I examine and rebut Ridge’s two arguments for Capacity Judgment Internalism (simply qua their particular character and content, first person normative judgments are necessarily capable of motivating without the help of any independent desire). First, the rejection of the possibility of anormativism (sec. 2), second, an argument from the rational requirement to intend to do as one judges that one ought to do (sec. 3). I conclude with a few remarks about the nature of this requirement and about verdicts of akrasia. (sec. 4)

The Joint Vienna Institute

"How does the intellectual role played by international training organisations fit into the contemporary architecture of global governance? The international diffusion of economic policy ideas represents one of the core dimensions of contemporary global governance, which has generated heated controversy in recent years with international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank castigated for championing a ‘one-size-fits-all’ brand of neoliberal economic reform. Yet while substantial scholarly attention has focused on analysing the effects of the formal compliance mechanisms that the IMF and the World Bank rely on to implement neoliberal policy changes in borrowing countries, such as loan conditionality, less attention has been devoted to exploring the intermediate avenues through which neoliberal ideas travel from global governance institutions to national governance contexts. This article aims to address this gap in the study of contemporary global governance and neoliberal policy diffusion through critically examining the evolving role of the Joint Vienna Institute (JVI), an international training organisation set up after the end of the Cold War to transmit global ‘best practice’ economic policy ideas to national officials in post-communist economies.

Sewerage: a return to basics to benefit the poor

Around 2.8 billion people, mostly in developing countries, currently lack adequate sanitation. Approximately half live in urban areas, where the most appropriate sanitation solution is commonly simplified sewerage. This paper presents the rigorous hydraulic design basis of simplified sewerage and compares this design approach with that used in the UK for conventional sewerage. It reviews simplified sewerage construction and how this achieves major cost savings and also avoids the problems commonly experienced with manholes

Moral responsibility and mental illness : a case study

Various authors have argued that progress in the neurocognitive and neuropsychiatric sciences might threaten the commonsense understanding of how the mind generates behavior, and, as a consequence, it might also threaten the commonsense ways of attributing moral responsibility, if not the very notion of moral responsibility. In the case of actions that result in undesirable outcomes (e.g., someone being harmed), the commonsense conception—which is reflected in sophisticated ways in the legal conception—tells us that there are circumstances in which the agent is entirely and fully responsible for the bad outcome (and deserves to be punished accordingly) and circumstances in which the agent is not at all responsible for the bad outcome (and thereby the agent does not deserve to be punished)

Narratives of Diversity in the Corporate Boardroom: What Corporate Insiders Say About Why Diversity Matters

Over the last generation, the concept of diversity has become commonplace and taken-for-granted in discourses ranging from law to education to business. In higher education, for example, it is hard to imagine a faculty job search or a student admissions discussion that was not heavily laden with talk of diversity, in the sense of the representative inclusion of women and racial and ethnic minorities in a group or organization. In this paper we present the results of an interview-based study of the discourse of diversity in a particular business setting: the corporate boardroom. Our principal observation is that—thirty-one years after the Supreme Court’s Bakke decision introduced the term into public discourse--corporate insiders appear not to have arrived at a master narrative to explain the pursuit of diversity on boards of directors. Instead, their accounts stress a variety of factors and feature few concrete examples

The EU’s deal on Greece shows that Europe remains wedded to the politics of austerity

On 20 February, Greece agreed to a four month extension of its current bailout programme, subject to the approval of reform measures proposed by the Greek government. André Broome writes that while the election of the Syriza-led coalition in Greece was initially hailed as a game-changing event that could bring an end to austerity in Europe, the negotiations between Greece and the ‘Troika’ demonstrate why a sharp turn away from austerity policies in Eurozone bailouts remains highly unlikely