Hi, and welcome to the 65th edition of the Philosophers' Carnival - a fortnightly roundup of some of the best philosophical blog posts from around the web. I've narrowed the abundance of submissions down to just twelve of my favourites. Enjoy!
Moral and Political Philosophy
Avery Archer discusses McDowell On Virtue. Can one plausibly maintain that 'virtue is knowledge' -- a matter of moral perception -- or does this imply that non-virtue is merely a matter of ignorance and hence involuntary?
Justin at Show-Me The Argument argues that anti-gay attitudes are sexist. There's some lively debate in the comments section.
Zombat relates consciousness to moral status and moral agency. Do phenomenal zombies have moral status? If not, could they be moral agents nonetheless?
Roman Altshuler argues that "Kant’s claim that we act on maxims that we adopt is not an empirical thesis, and that we cannot take it as such without lobotomizing his moral philosophy."
Let me recommend Harry Brighouse's Crooked Timber post on the ethics of voting, which touches on broader issues of coercion and obligation.
Mind and Language
Gary Williams discusses the classic problem of perception: "Am I merely perceiving representations, or ideas, in my head, or am I really looking at the external world?" He advocates James Gibson's solution: that we perceive the 'ambient optic array' of light bouncing about our immediate environment.
Kenny Pearce presents Berkeley's Theory of Reference and the Critique of Matter, explaining why semantic holism ("some symbols may not correspond to anything at all, but gain meaning by being part of the system") is no defence against the anti-materialist objection that we have no grip on "the idea of 'material stuff' abstracted away from any particular qualities a particular object might have."
Metaphysics
David Gawthorne defends the neo-Meinongian, anti-Quinean view that we can quantify over non-existent things. Responding to Lewis' objection that this is really just the view that every conceivable thing exists, Gawthorne argues that such philosophers have lost their grip on the pre-theoretic notion of existence that we really care about. (I have some sympathy for such concerns...)
Jason Zarri hopes to deflate debates by assigning a different term to each view: knowledge1, knowledge2, etc., so that the disputants are seen to be simply talking past each other. It's an interesting question just when this sort of move is legitimate.
Over in Platonic Heaven, we find a discussion of the abstract/concrete distinction. In particular, Joongol Kim objects to the analysis: "an entity is concrete iff it belongs to an ontic category to which belongs something that has spatial or temporal parts."
Andrew Cullison offers some objections to the view that "material objects just are regions of space."
Finally, Andrew Bacon has a great post on counterparts and actuality, defusing Delia Graff Fara's objections to counterpart theory by subtly clarifying how we should interpret the actuality operator on the assumption that a single possible world can represent multiple possibilities. Highly recommended!
Concluding Remarks
That's it for this edition of the Philosophers' Carnival, I hope you enjoyed it. While you're here at Philosophy, et cetera, feel free to have a look around and join in any of the discussions that interest you.
N.B. Academics are especially invited to consider my proposed online draft-sharing and feedback system and vote in the sidebar poll, so that I can gauge the level of interest for such a project. Thanks!
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Philosophers' Carnival #65
Friday, February 29, 2008
Good Government requires Civic Culture
Democracy is only as good (or as bad) as the demos. Cf. Matthew Yglesias:
If you have the relevant social conditions to support good government -- competent media, engaged citizenry, civil society groups that can form the basis of electoral coalitions, a political culture that values honesty -- then a politician who engages in a lot of shady behavior is likely to find himself voted out of office whether or not the shadiness in question is formally illegal. Conversely, absent adequate social conditions even the most admirable legal framework becomes a dead letter -- nobody investigates violations and/or nobody cares. At the end of the day there are always going to be loopholes in whatever scheme you create. You see good government when and where the citizens want it and are able to punish those who don't give it to them.
See also Timothy Burke:
The key priority is to rebuild the way the federal government actually functions in both its everyday and extraordinary business... the whole point of the U.S. Constitution [is] that it is an uncommitted, non-partisan prior constraint on the uses of governmental authority. If it turns out that its guarantees rest not so much on its formal provisions, but just on men and women of good will and honest commitment agreeing to live up to their responsibilities under the law and the social contract, then that’s what we need to work to rebuild and restore. The last eight years have been a test, and a lot of people, some of them surprising, failed it. Equally, many people in all parties and factions passed, which is also worth a lot of attention. A lot of the downward momentum has been arrested by people with whom I strongly disagree on political positions, but whose dedication to their office and responsibilities I appreciate. Much of what we know about what has gone wrong in the last eight years is due to Republicans inside and outside the Administration drawing some lines in the sand...
We thought transparency could help, and it does somewhat. Transparency only helps, however, if there are strongly internalized professional and social ethical commitments that are widely distributed both in the general population and among the people who do the business of government, or education, or medicine, or any other major institution. If you don’t have enough people like Grant Woods, the liberal state will fail.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
WWSD?
Interesting post from Mark Rowlands at Secular Philosophy:
To a considerable extent it is society that has decided what is and what is not emotionally aberrant. What you should and should not feel when your most cherished beliefs are attacked is, in part, socially determined, and so what you actually do or do not feel is, to a considerable though not exhaustive extent, socially constructed. This is a theme brilliantly explored by J.M. Coetzee in various novels, most notably The Lives of Animals. And, for one reason or another, our society has determined that emotional outpourings of a sort that would be regarded as aberrant in the case of other beliefs are perfectly legitimate in the case of religious beliefs...
Part of what is involved in being an adult – part of the wonder of growing up – is being both able and willing to have one’s beliefs subjected to critical examination without existentially shrivelling in the process. If society discourages us from this by making us believe that extraordinary outpourings of emotion are OK in connection with certain beliefs rather than others, then society is simply trying to prolong our childhood. And if anyone doubts, or is interested in, the rise and rise of infantilization in contemporary society, I heartily recommend Michael Bywater’s Big Babies.
If Christians ask themselves ‘what would Jesus do?’ philosophers should, it seems, ask themselves, ‘What would Socrates do?’ It’s a long time since I read any of the Platonic dialogues, but if my memory is not deceiving me, Thrasymachus didn’t break down when Socrates cast doubt on his claim that ‘justice is the advantage of the stronger.’ But even if he had, I don’t think it would have stopped Socrates.
Friday, February 01, 2008
New blog
Gender, Race and Philosophy (via feminist philosophers).
Their first post is about Obama and deliberative democracy. Very cool.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
Top of the Blogs
Crooked Timber invites nominations for the five best blog posts ever. The following spring to mind:
(1) Hilzoy's 'Hatred is a Poison'.
(2) Hilzoy on 'Liberating Iraq' (and the distorting effect of violence more generally)
(3) Katherine's series on "extraordinary rendition".
(4) Jason Kuznicki's 'On Nurturing as the True Purpose of Marriage'.
(5) Fafblog with The Priest-Avatar of the State:
[The President] exists not to guide the nation to where it should be. He exists to project an image of what it wants to be.
America doesn't need a President to lead them; America needs a President who projects leadership. America doesn't need a President who's honest with his country; America needs a President who's honest with his wife. America doesn't need a President with a firm grasp of policy and a commitment to serving his country; America needs a President with the appearance of irrepressible optimism and Wholesome Heartland Values. America doesn't need a capable wartime President; America needs a President who makes himself look like war.
And President Bush has done a magnificent job of that. Indeed, he's even started a couple of them. Remember, it's not the President's job to finish or win wars - that falls into the lower realm of policy. But within the realm of Strength - or the apprearance of Strength - it is the Strong Leader who charges boldly into wars, undaunted by the humdrum webs of "post-war planning" and laborious "coalition-building" called for by "sensitive" policy-makers.
The job of the President of the United States is to forcefully emote the conscious and unconscious will of the American People. He is not the commander-in-chief. He is the Happy Warrior. He is the Priest-Avatar of the State.
(Again, Hilzoy offers the best serious version.)
Others have suggested Jacob Levy's contrasting of political theory and political philosophy, and Jack Balkin's 'What I learned about blogging in a year' - which is all the conventional wisdom now, but pretty insightful for its day (Jan 2004!).
Any other suggestions?
Monday, August 27, 2007
Philosophers' Carnival #52
Welcome to the 52nd edition of the Philosophers' Carnival! If you have no idea what this is, follow the previous link. Otherwise, follow the subsequent ones...
Moral and Political Philosophy
Parableman Jeremy Pierce discusses Judicial Confirmation Philosophy, rejecting two extreme views about the role of the Senate in questioning and confirming judicial nominees:
On this mediating view, nominees should not be expected to comment on individual cases, but they should be expected to be able to present a judicial philosophy... it's fair game to say whether a certain decision was wrongly or rightly decided and what would have been better reasoning if any. It's fair game to comment on what considerations might go into overturning a particular precedent without indicating (as a promise) what one will do, allowing for all manner of alternative considerations to weigh a decision in a different direction. I could say why I think a certain case was wrongly decided while remaining open about whether I'd overturn it. I can also say that I think there's a reason for overturning it while remaining open about other reasons not to overturn it that I may not even have considered. As long as it's kept at that level, you would get some discussion of more substantive issues than what has happened recently. Yet it wouldn't be the politicized mess that we have been getting either.
Peter Thurley writes on the distinction between positive and negative rights:
[T]he enforcement and guaranteeing of a negative right is itself a positive action. If we have the negative right to life, a right that prohibits others from killing us, how can that right be secured without an appeal to a police force, a criminal justice system, lawyers, guards and the appropriate funding from taxes to support such a system?
Granted, it's an empirical question how rights might best be secured, but that won't deter James Wilson at the Philosophy and Bioethics blog, who asks, 'What can political philosophers learn from bioethicists?' His answer: "how to go about applying abstract normative theories to the real world." Whether trying to predict consequences or apply general principles, the task may prove more difficult than expected.
Jean Kazez looks at really good people, and the role of emotions - from compassion to anger - in moral motivation.
As an Editor's Pick, allow me to highlight Chris' informative post at Mixing Memory on recent research into Folk Meta-Ethics:
There's a really interesting paper by Geoffrey Goodwin and John Darley in press at the journal Cognition on the subject of lay meta-ethics, and ethical objectivism specifically. That is, the paper explores the question, "How do lay individuals think about the objectivity of their ethical beliefs?" (from the abstract). The paper contains a ton of data, and I couldn't possibly do it justice in a blog post, but unfortunately, there's no free version online... So you'll have to do with my incomplete discussion of it.
Philosophy of Mind and Biology
Benoit Hardy-Vallée discusses Decision-making and the economy of nature:
[A] biological decision-maker is any agent who can control its behavior. More precisely, in order to have a genuine control over its behavior, an agent must possess control mechanisms, that is, internal structures that process sensory information and motor commands... I would like to suggest here that, contrarily to common wisdom, decision-making is not specifically human, but rather a behavioral control scheme typically found in animals endowed with sensory, motor and control apparatuses, and more specifically brainy animals (craniates, arthropods and cephalopods).
Kate Devitt goes even further, offering an empirically-informed introduction to the remarkable topic of bacterial cognition:
Even though bacteria may not be aware, they certainly have complex behaviour and decision-making worth examining. Bacteria perceive, remember, problem-solve, learn and communicate. Understanding how they make group and individual decisions may contribute importantly to our understanding of cognition across many species including humans.
The Uncredible Hallq discusses Peripheral vision and the limits of introspection, drawing out the implications of the fact that we overestimate the level of detail represented towards the periphery of our visual field.
Bryan Norwood at Movement of Existence presents Arguments for the Necessity of Phenomenology - the view that "approaches our understanding of the world as a result of experienced phenomenon."
Tanasije Gjorgoski asks A Question About Epiphenomenalism (or two):
[It] seems that epiphenomenalist can’t after all accept causal theory of reference, as that would mean that by ‘conscious experience’ she is referring to something physical. So, what kind of grounding of reference does epiphenomenalist buy? Can zombies refer to conscious experience at all?
Language and Epistemology
Richard Brown distinguishes Two Kinds of Semantics:
One might take the semantic task to be that of giving the meaning of and truth-conditions for thoughts... [or] of giving the meaning of sentences independently of their being used to express any thought. This way of thinking about semantics has it as simply a part of grammar. To illustrate, if I say ‘Saul Kripke likes tea’ talking about my dog and you say it talking about Saul Kripke we both use the same sentence, though we refer to different objects.
Aidan McGlynn discusses whether know-how is Gettier-susceptible, and how this question impacts on debates about the relation between knowledge-how and knowledge-that.
Meanwhile, at The Space of Reasons, Avery Archer assesses Naturalising Epistemology: Quine vs. Crumley (Part 2):
Crumley claims that nature may favour belief-forming mechanism that form false beliefs. However, Crumley seems to be overstating the case...
The Primate Diaries argues that neuroscience undermines religious experience:
It's not too much of a stretch to link such phantom limbs with a feeling for God. What's more likely? That an invisible world exists that controls our destiny (but that people around the globe interpret in vastly different ways) or that all humans have similar neural networks that, under certain circumstances, engender a feeling of the divine? A great deal of work has been done in just this area...
Enigman, on the other hand, presents An Argument for Agnosticism - suggesting that the mysteries of theism and atheism balance out.
Meta-philosophy
At The Ends of Thought, Roman Altshuler discusses Philosophical Approaches and their Consistency with the History. His primary concern is to elucidate how both the analytic and continental traditions can be seen as continuing what went before -- be it by offering clear arguments for specific positions, or pressing a broader "cast of thought" or philosophical system.
Finally, Michele Loi has a very interesting post on the partiality of truth and philosophical methodology. He proposes an 'Hegelian' view according to which philosophical progress is best made by synthesizing the various "partial truths" found in existing philosophical traditions. If you have an opposing view, see if you can convince him of its (whole or partial) truth.
That's it for this edition of the Philosophers' Carnival. Many thanks to all who contributed a submission (well, except for the self-help writers who seem to have been misled by the proximity of the 'philosophy' section in their local bookstore)! Only a minority made the final cut -- but the carnival will return in three weeks, this time at the Florida Student Philosophy Blog. You can submit a post here.
If you would like to host a future edition yourself, check out the guidelines here. (There are spaces available in 2008 -- consult the list of 'future hosts'.)
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Stephen Law on Faith Schools
[Quote] If you believe that such authority-based religious education is acceptable, then let me leave you with a question. Suppose authoritarian political schools started opening up around the country. A conservative school opens in Sydney, followed by a communist school in Melbourne. These schools select on the basis of parents’ political beliefs. Portraits of political leaders beam serenely down from classroom walls. Each day begins with the collective singing of a political anthem. Pupils are expected to defer, more or less unquestioningly, to their school’s political authority and its revered political texts. Rarely are children exposed to alternative political points of view, except, perhaps, in a caricatured form, so they can be sweepingly dismissed.
What would be the public’s reaction to such schools? Outrage. These schools would be accused of stunting children - of forcing their minds into politically pre-approved moulds.
My question is: if such authoritarian political schools are utterly beyond the pale, why are so many of us prepared to tolerate their religious equivalents?
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Words of Wisdom
Rationality is not for winning debates, it is for deciding which side to join. If you've already decided which side to argue for, the work of rationality is done within you, whether well or poorly.
Julian Sanchez, on being 'exactly good enough to suck':
All of us, whenever we try anything at which we're not naturally gifted, are condemned to pass through this unfortunate phase. We're no longer just goofing about, subject to the comfortably lax criteria of the cheerfully hopeless—what a marvelous finger painting for a five year old! But neither are we yet (much optimism lurks in that "yet") proficient enough to be any damn good... If we want to improve past a certain point, we're forced to accept that getting better will, at least initially, make us worse.
Timothy Burke:
I just do the things I love and ask my daughter if she wants to do them with me... I don’t tell her it’s a duty for her to do it because she’s a girl and she’s fighting hegemonic narratives about gender. I do it because I still like to do it, and so it’s my culture and my life and I share it...
The problem with the commandment: no. “That scene is bad: do not watch it.” “That image is bad: feel bad about it.” “That character is bad: do not like him or her”. It puts a kid in an impossible position: but I like fairies! I like pink! I like war toys! I like video games! I like television! even though Mom and Dad say I must not. Desire doesn’t just become mysterious suddenly at 18, it always is. Being the censor puts us in an impossible position, because we have to playact at virtues we don’t feel in any deep way ourselves. “Why, yes, that image was quite bad, my darling! Let’s, uh, watch the movie again so that we can reacquaint ourselves with its offensiveness.” ... Maybe we change culture best by viewing and doing and being what we desire and love best, and less by trying to perform the role of an ideal and virtuous self.
Update: and Peter Levine on 'optimistic' vs. 'resentful' populism:
There is a powerful, optimistic kind of populism that says: We can make wealth, and everyone can be better off, but we need to make sure that everyone is included in productive work. This is much better than the kind of populism that presumes there is a fixed quantity of goods, of which the powerful have taken more than their fair share...
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Hilzoy on Repentant Warmongers
'I don't mean this to be some sort of "I was right" triumphalism. What interests me is not so much who was right and who was wrong, but this particular version of being wrong -- a version that involves not just error, but errors like "I didn't realize until it was too late that I had to take reality into account", or: "I didn't fully appreciate the fact that making nice speeches isn't all there is to being President." And I'm also interested in why people seem willing to confess these kinds of profound error without any sense of intellectual shame, and why they continue to be given platforms in public life. Because until we find some way to ensure that we hear the opinions of people who know these sorts of things in advance, rather than having to learn them after hundreds of thousands of people have died, we are in deep, deep trouble.'
Read the whole thing.
Sunday, July 01, 2007
Links
- The fourth humanist symposium is here.
- Michael Cholbi starts a new blog on teaching philosophy: In Socrates' Wake.
- One Good Thing posts embarrassing parenting stories. The funniest:
For hands-down humiliation, however, I haven't yet been able to top my neighbor's misery, when his three year old daughter interrupted his poker game by running naked into the room and screaming with a joyous voice of discovery, "DADDY! DID YOU KNOW? I COME WITH MY OWN POCKET! AND IT CAN HOLD A PEN! LOOK!"
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Elsewhere
- Brandon discusses "value cocktails". Is 'democracy' equivocal, "a label for a mixture of different values", or can we pin down a unified understanding of 'democracy' that captures all the value we associate with it, at once?
- New blog "Ethics Etc." discusses Velleman's view that "unbearable pain" disintegrates the person. They point out a curious consequence: we cannot suffer unbearable pain (for our self would already have disintegrated)!
- TNR's Open University summarizes a recent panel on blogs and historical scholarship:
DeLong suggested that the basic point to understand with respect to the Internet is that the cost of scholarly communication has decreased dramatically over time and that this can't be bad.
- Chris at Mixing Memory discusses new evidence that monkeys have a theory of mind:
When they knew the experimenter couldn't see the containers, they chose the silent one so that they could get the food without the human noticing, but when they knew the experimenter could see them approaching, they preferred the noisy container. This implies that the macaques understood how both visual and auditory information would affect the experimenter's behavior, and furthermore that auditory information would only affect his behavior if he couldn't see what the monkey was doing.It still seems open to deflationary explanations, however. Mightn't the monkeys know that noises provoke responses from "eyeless" creatures, without grasping the underlying (mental) reasons why?
- Also interesting: David Ryfe on the sociology of deliberation.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Hilzoy on Torture
In light of expert testimony that "the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable", this bears repeating:Arguing about torture without asking [whether it is actually effective] is like arguing about whether you must, absolutely must, eat your children to keep yourself from starving to death without first checking to see whether you have any other food available...
People who don't bother to ask that question are not serious about winning; they're in love with a fantasy of themselves as the person who is tough enough to do all those dirty things that have to be done while other people just wring their hands and whimper.
If you're serious about war, you should ask yourself, at every juncture, what will best achieve your objectives, rather than embracing some sort of Rambo fantasy. That would require asking very serious questions about the effectiveness of torture, and also about the effect it is likely to have on our long-term objectives, and the possibility that by forfeiting our moral authority, we lose much more in the long term than we could gain even if torture did work. If you're serious about loving your country, you should never be willing to degrade it, or to embrace in its name the kinds of techniques that made us rightly despise Stalin. And if you're serious about morality, you should know that there are lines you cross only at the risk of losing your soul. It's bad enough to lose your soul because you had to choose between two great evils, and you chose wrong. But there's no excuse for letting your soul slip through your fingers because you're too busy striking a stern and heroic attitude to notice.
Monday, May 21, 2007
More links
- Week 2 of the Online Philosophy Conference is now up.
- The Humanist Symposium is a promising new carnival for blogs that "affirm the inherent dignity and worth of human life and our ability to seek truth, gain wisdom, and tell right from wrong through the application of reason." The latest edition is here.
- The new Feminist Philosophers blog is well worth a read.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Some Links
Check out the 2nd annual Online Philosophy Conference. I hope I'll have time to read the papers and chip in with some comments soon.
The 47th Philosophers' Carnival is here, with a focus on "practical philosophy". We need more volunteers to host future editions, so email me if you're interested.
I found the entry on sexual perversion especially interesting. It's a fundamental question whether an act might ever be wrong due to its being "abnormal" or "perverse", independently of any harmful consequences. Whence comes the normative authority of these externally imposed "purposes" that mustn't ever be replaced? (In other contexts we praise innovation, after all!)
Finally, I note that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy finally has an entry on the meaning of life:English-speaking philosophers can be expected to continue to find life's meaning of interest as they increasingly realize that it is a distinct line of enquiry that admits of rational enquiry to no less a degree than more familiar normative categories such as well-being, right action, and distributive justice.
Doesn't it reflect poorly on our discipline's recent history that this doesn't "go without saying"?
Friday, March 02, 2007
Citizens, Carnivals, and Symposia
The 4th (and perhaps final) Carnival of Citizens is now up at Positive Liberty.
My post on Religion and Deliberation elicited an interesting response from Mark Olsen (I've left a comment there, in turn). Another post, by Ruth Joy, argues that Democracy Needs Religion. Her post rests on the confusion of religion with ethical reasoning (moral philosophy). What we really need, of course, is the latter. ("Without it, we are left [with] making decisions based on force or power.")
Moving on, Don Jr. has helpfully organized a new Citizens’ Symposium, which will hopefully prove more successful at fostering dialogue than the old carnival format. The first edition will be on the topic of "free speech", with entries due by March 24th. Consult the website for further details -- and spread the word!
Blogs That Make You Go Hmm...
Sage was kind enough to tag me with a 'Thinking Blogger Award'. The rule: If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think. It's interesting to trace the thread back and see all the interesting blogs that various people have chosen.
Anyway, since every blog that I read qualifies, here are five that I happen to feel like highlighting today...
1. Stumbling and Mumbling - a left-libertarian challenging conventional wisdom.
2. Peter Levine - discusses civic engagement, deliberative democracy, etc.
3. Will Wilkinson / The Fly Bottle - a thoughtful capitalist.
4. The Splintered Mind - philosophy of mind, etc.
5. Philosophy from the Left Coast - but not too left. Plus philosophy. Good stuff.
Friday, February 02, 2007
Miscellany
250k - Philosophy, et cetera passed 1/4 million visits earlier this week!
Carnival of Citizens - The next edition looks likely to remain in the standard format (though incorporating the sort of 'response space' Kenny suggested) -- official details will be posted to the newsletter once available.
I'm told there's a fair bit of support for converting it into a "symposium" style after that, though the precise details haven't been worked out yet. Feel free to chip in, back in the public brainstorming thread.
Flatland - I owe Brandon one for bringing to my attention this classic story. It introduces some fascinating perspectives, including the point in a dimensionless void, who cannot even conceive of anything external to itself. And of course the main character, a square in the plane of "Flatland", who is initially shocked to learn of a third dimension from which a visitor can see his "insides"! Quite delightful. I can't wait to see the how the movie turns out...
Better Together - this report on promoting civic engagement was put together by a group including political philosopher Amy Gutmann and Senator Barack Obama. Worth a look. Here's a nice section highlighting the need for meta-politics:Recommendation 4: Broaden the Role of Citizens in Restructuring Government. Most political debate revolves around questions of government spending and regulation. Should the government provide more money for K-12 education? Subsidize prescription drugs for senior citizens? Require that all gun owners be licensed? We spend far less time mulling an equally important set of questions: How government should be constituted (i.e., highly centralized, or highly decentralized), what the responsibilities of different levels of government should be, and what processes should govern political decision-making. Because these questions receive inadequate attention, we endorse formal and regular re-evaluations of local, state, and national government structures along the lines of the charter-review commissions recently empowered to rethink the governing structures of the City and County of Los Angeles.
As happened in Los Angeles, such reviews should tackle a fundamental question: Which level of government should fulfill which functions? While some programs can be effectively provided only by the national government, as proponents of community involvement, we are concerned about the concentration of power in larger and larger entities. When policy decisions and delivery take place on a plane far above local capacities, then ordinary people tune out, figuring they can’t make a difference. From the vantage point of increasing social capital, smaller is better than larger, and local is better than national. To the extent possible given the imperatives of equal treatment and program effectiveness, governmental decision-making authority should be pushed downward so that citizens believe they can have an influence over the policies that affect their lives.
Thursday, June 03, 2004
Category: BlogRoll & Links
(See also Useful Links for free sites and services that I highly recommend.)
Meta-blogging:
University Group Blogs:
Topical Group Blogs:
Information Sources (i.e. sites which are full of good links, and updated regularly):
Philosophy:
Science:
Politics / Culture:
New Zealand political blogs:
