The debate over compensation packages for top executives is discussed. Particular emphasis is placed on the decoupling of CEO pay and organizational performance. A contrast is drawn between firms that are owner-controlled and those that are manager-controlled. Owner-controlled firms tend to be more market-driven. In manager-controlled firms, however, ownership can become diluted to the point where decisions may not always be in the best interest of shareholders. The process of determining CEO compensation packages is examined, and special attention is given (...) to the handling of stock options. In order to stem the threat of increased government intervention, suggestions are made for increasing the leverage of compensation committees and of shareholders in general. (shrink)

This expanded edition of C L Hardin's ground-breaking work on colour features a new chapter, 'Further Thoughts: 1993', in which the author revisits the dispute ...

At the end of a thoughtful article on the future of nuclear war, Wiesner and York concluded that: "Both sides in the arms race are... confronted by the dilemma of steadily increasing military power and steadily decreasing national security. It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution. If the great powers continue to look for solutions in the area of science and technology only, the result will be to worsen the situation.".

What does it mean to "trust?" What makes us feel secure enough to place our confidence—even at times our welfare—in the hands of other people? Is it possible to "trust" an institution? What exactly do people mean when they claim to "distrust" their governments? As difficult as it may be to define, trust is essential to the formation and maintenance of a civil society. In Trust and Trustworthiness political scientist Russell Hardin addresses the standard theories of trust and articulates (...) his own new and compelling idea: that much of what we call trust can be best described as "encapsulated interest." Research into the roles of trust in our society has offered a broad range of often conflicting theories. Some theorists maintain that trust is a social virtue that cannot be reduced to strategic self-interest; others claim that trusting another person is ultimately a rational calculation based on information about that person and his or her incentives and motivations. Hardin argues that we place our trust in persons whom we believe to have strong reasons to act in our best interests. He claims that we are correct when we assume that the main incentive of those whom we trust is to maintain a relationship with us—whether it be for reasons of economic benefit or for love and friendship. Hardin articulates his theory using examples from a broad array of personal and social relationships, paying particular attention to explanations of the development of trusting relationships. He also examines trustworthiness and seeks to understand why people may behave in ways that violate their own self-interest in order to honor commitments they have made to others. The book also draws important distinctions between vernacular uses of "trust" and "trustworthiness," contrasting, for example, the type of trust (or distrust) we place in individuals with the trust we place in institutions Trust and Trustworthiness represents the culmination of important new research into the roles of trust in our society; it offers a challenging new voice in the current discourse about the origins of cooperative behavior and its consequences for social and civic life. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust. (shrink)

Hardin demonstrates that many of these structural issues can and should be distinguished from the thornier problems of utilitarian value theory, and he is able ...

Political liberalism began in the eighteenth century with the effort to establish a secular state in which religious differences would be tolerated. If religious views include universal principles to apply to all by force if necessary, diverse religions must conflict, perhaps fatally. In a sense, then, political liberalism was an invention to resolve a then current, awful problem. Its proponents were articulate and finally persuasive. There have been many comparable social inventions, many of which have failed, as Communism, egalitarianism, and (...) perhaps socialism have all failed to date. The extraordinary thing about political liberalism is that it seems to have succeeded in its authors' initial hope for it. It may have helped end the turmoil occasioned by religious differences. Political liberalism has since expanded in various ways under other influences, and, if it were not for Islamic fundamentalism with its seemingly coercive theocratic program, we might no longer today associate religious conflict with the core of liberalism in its actual practice. (shrink)

In a book that challenges the most widely held ideas of why individuals engage in collective conflict, Russell Hardin offers a timely, crucial explanation of group action in its most destructive forms. Contrary to those observers who attribute group violence to irrationality, primordial instinct, or complex psychology, Hardin uncovers a systematic exploitation of self-interest in the underpinnings of group identification and collective violence. Using examples from Mafia vendettas to ethnic violence in places such as Bosnia and Rwanda, he (...) describes the social and economic circumstances that set this violence into motion. Hardin explains why hatred alone does not necessarily start wars but how leaders cultivate it to mobilize their people. He also reveals the thinking behind the preemptive strikes that contribute to much of the violence between groups, identifies the dangers of "particularist" communitarianism, and argues for government structures to prevent any ethnic or other group from having too much sway. Exploring conflict between groups such as Serbs and Croats, Hutu and Tutsi, Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants, Hardin vividly illustrates the danger that arises when individual and group interests merge. In these examples, groups of people have been governed by movements that managed to reflect their members' personal interests--mainly by striving for political and economic advances at the expense of other groups and by closing themselves off from society at large. The author concludes that we make a better and safer world if we design our social institutions to facilitate individual efforts to achieve personal goals than if we concentrate on the ethnic political makeup of our respective societies. (shrink)

Hardin presents an essentially economic account of what an individual can come to know and then applies this account to many areas of ordinary life: political participation, religious beliefs, popular knowledge of science, liberalism, ...

Many realists have maintained that the success of scientific theories can be explained only if they may be regarded as approximately true. Laurens Laudan has in turn contended that a necessary condition for a theory's being approximately true is that its central terms refer, and since many successful theories of the past have employed central terms which we now understand to be non-referential, realism cannot explain their success. The present paper argues that a realist can adopt a view of reference (...) according to which a theory might plausibly be said to be approximately true even though its central terms do not refer, or alternatively, he may construe reference in such a way as to assign reference to a range of successful older theories which includes Laudan's purported counterexamples. (shrink)

This book tackles the problem of overpopulation with an honesty and fearlessness that is unrivalled. Hardin suggests radical approaches to overpopulation and considers the consequences. This book is an intellectual feast that will enrage, disturb, and challenge the reader at every page.

This expanded edition of C. L. Hardin's ground-breaking work on color features a new chapter, Further Thoughts: 1993, in which the author revisits the dispute between color objectivists and subjectivists from the perspective of the ecology, genetics, and evolution of color vision, and brings to bear new data on individual variability in color perception.

Hume's place in history -- Moral psychology -- Strategic analysis -- Convention -- Political theory -- Justice as order -- Utilitarianism -- Value theory -- Retrospective.

Book reviewed in this article: The Imperative of Responsibility. In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. By Hans Jonas.

Rational choice and other accounts of trust base it in objective assessments of the risks and benefits of trusting. But rational subjects must choose in the light of what knowledge they have, and that knowledge determines their capacities for trust. This is an epistemological issue, but not at the usual level of the philosophy of knowledge. Rather, it is an issue of pragmatic rationality for a given actor. It is commonly argued that trust is inherently embedded in iterated, thick relationships. (...) But such relationships are merely one source of relevant knowledge in a street-level epistemological account. Early experience may heavily influence later capacity for trust. For example, bad experience may lead to lower levels of trust and therefore fewer opportunities for mutual gain. (shrink)

In simple action theory, when people choose between courses of action, they know what the outcome will be. When an individual is making a choice "against nature," such as switching on a light, that assumption may hold true. But in strategic interaction outcomes, indeterminacy is pervasive and often intractable. Whether one is choosing for oneself or making a choice about a policy matter, it is usually possible only to make a guess about the outcome, one based on anticipating what other (...) actors will do. In this book Russell Hardin asserts, in his characteristically clear and uncompromising prose, "Indeterminacy in contexts of strategic interaction... Is an issue that is constantly swept under the rug because it is often disruptive to pristine social theory. But the theory is fake: the indeterminacy is real."In the course of the book, Hardin thus outlines the various ways in which theorists from Hobbes to Rawls have gone wrong in denying or ignoring indeterminacy, and suggests how social theories would be enhanced--and how certain problems could be resolved effectively or successfully--if they assumed from the beginning that indeterminacy was the normal state of affairs, not the exception. Representing a bold challenge to widely held theoretical assumptions and habits of thought, Indeterminacy and Society will be debated across a range of fields including politics, law, philosophy, economics, and business management. (shrink)

What ecological advantages do animals gain by being able to detect, extract and exploit wavelength information? What are the advantages of representing that information as hue qualities? The benefits of adding chromatic to achromatic vision, marginal in object detection, become apparent in object recognition and receiving biological signals. It is argued that this improved performance is a direct consequence of the fact that many animals' visual systems reduce wavelength information to combinations of four basic hues. This engenders a simple categorical (...) scheme that permits a rich amount of sensory information to be rapidly and efficiently employed by cognitive machinery of limited capacity. (shrink)

The central argument of this book is that liberalism, constitutionalism, and democracy, as well as, specifically, liberal constitutional democracy all work, when they do, because they serve the mutual advantage of the politically effective groups in the society through coordination of those groups on a political and, perhaps, economic order. These arguments are applied both to the early history of constitutional developments in the United States and to contemporary transitions from autocratic regimes to market democracies. A subsidiary claim is that (...) constitutional political institutions and democratic procedures generally require not so much active support as merely acquiescence in order to survive and work. These are explanatory theses, not normative claims, but they have relevance for normative claims if one takes seriously some relative of Kant's dictum that ought implies can. If we are to insist that some form of government is normatively right for a particular society, we must be able to say that it would or could work for that society. It is commonly argued that what makes democracy right is that it works by consent. If so, it is such a distressingly minimal form of consent—acquiescence—as to be normatively disqualified. If we rule out mere acquiescence as adequate for consent, it seems likely that no credible argument can be adduced to defend liberal constitutional democracy in any detail on grounds of consent or contractarianism. Hence, concern for workability, which should be central to any moral assessment of principles of social order, undercuts the entire consent school of political theory. (shrink)

Recent scientific findings have addressed matters of concern to philosophers interested in color perception and the place of color in the physical world. There has been some progress in understanding the neural basis of the unique hues, but it has been slower than one might have hoped. Opponency can indeed break down; the perception of red-green binaries has been confirmed using improved methodology. Variation of color perception among normal observers is manifested in substantial differences in the loci of unique hues (...) as well as in variations in metameric matching. The sources of the former variation are not well understood, but the latter have been shown to depend in part on polymorphisms of visual photopigments that have only been discovered in the last few years. These are genetically sex-linked and raise the possibility of female tetrachromats. Indeed, the existence of at least one female (retinal) tetrachromat has now been confirmed. All of these variations pose the question of which, if any, normal observers perceives colors veridically. (shrink)

Decisions about limiting directives and Do Not Resuscitate orders in perianesthesia settings raise enduring ethical questions about power, responsibility, and compassion in clinical practice. This article advances the emancipatory theory of compassion for nursing by using these tensions to explore how the theory's core concepts operate within everyday clinical decision‐making. The inquiry uses qualitative data from interviews, observations, and artifact reviews involving 27 participants, including patients, family members, and clinicians in a tertiary surgical services department. The results illustrate how distance, (...) free‐floating responsibility, and the zoe/bios dichotomy shape interactions between patients and clinicians. Together, these dynamics can normalize the suspension of limiting directives, rendering ethically troubling practices unspeakable within routine clinical work. At the same time, moments emerge when clinicians or family members insist that patient preferences be addressed, interrupting these patterns and creating space for more compassionate forms of practice. By demonstrating how these theoretical concepts illuminate the ethical dynamics of perianesthesia care, the analysis contributes to the continuing development of emancipatory nursing theory while highlighting how attention to relational power may help create more equitable and compassionate clinical encounters. (shrink)

The paradox of mass voting is not, generally speaking, matched by a paradoxical mass attempt to be politically well informed. As Converse underscored, most people are grossly politically ignorant—just as they would be if, as rational‐ignorance theory holds, they realized that their votes don't matter. Yet many millions of them contradict the theory by voting. This contradiction, and the illogical reasons people offer for voting, suggest that the logic of collective action does not come naturally to people. To equate public (...) ignorance with “rational ignorance,” then, attributes too much theoretical self‐consciousness to people. Even if their ignorance is not based on a grasp of the collective‐action problem, however, people's political ignorance is “rational”: but it is less a matter of calculating the low benefit likely to flow from one vote in a sea of millions, than of encountering the much higher cost of being well informed as compared to voting. As the high cost of becoming well informed appears likely to grow, it may be advisable to move off of the political agenda issues that have no clear continuum toward which a mostly ignorant median voter may gravitate. (shrink)

Hardin discusses the forms that moral reasoning might take—from rationalist actor theory to Kantian proceduralism to ad hoc Kantianism—and the relation of Kant's dictum to the institutional nature of much of international affairs.

HARDIN PK. Nursing Inquiry 2003; 10: 209–217 Shape-shifting discourses of anorexia nervosa: reconstituting psychopathologyThis article explores how the circuitous relationship between individuals, the media, and discursive systems replicate and reinforce the act of self-starvation in young women. Using a feminist poststructuralist methodology, the focus of this article is on how discourses and institutional practices operate to position young women who take up the subject position of wanting to be diagnosed as anorexic. Utilizing data from online accounts and individual interviews, (...) I attend to the ways in which young women are institutionally positioned as ‘anorexics’ and the effects that those positions have on their behaviors, in addition to reinforcing institutional practices that construct anorexia nervosa. Questions addressed through this inquiry are: How do institutional practices create and continue to constitute ‘anorexia nervosa’? How do discourses operate to position young women such that they are either included and/or excluded into the category of ‘anorexia nervosa’? What are the effects and consequences that emanate from these positionings? (shrink)

The standard mathematical account of the sub-metrical geometry of a space employs topology, whose foundational concept is the open set. This proves to be an unhappy choice for discrete spaces, and offers no insight into the physical origin of geometrical structure. I outline an alternative, the Theory of Linear Structures, whose foundational concept is the line. Application to Relativistic space-time reveals that the whole geometry of space-time derives from temporal structure. In this sense, instead of spatializing time, Relativity temporalizes space.

Can qualia be analyzed by theories that contain only non-qualitative terms? A host of philosophers including Block, Levine, Nagel, and Jackson have argued that, in principle, they cannot. And yet psychophysicists have advanced explanations that seem to account for sensory appearances in terms of the operations of nervous systems. Here are some examples: Mach bands, the assimilation effect, and the Hermann grid illusion all have to do with the look of things, and all are routinely thought to be a consequence (...) of the structure of visual receptive fields. Simultaneous contrast and auditory tuning—both perceptual effects—are lateral inhibition phenomena. That television sets with only three phosphor colors can replicate natural scenes with thousands of distinguishable colors is due to our eyes having just three photopigments. The difference between a three-type receptoral configuration and an array of thousands of receptors with distinct responses accounts for the fact that hues form a closed loop in color space, whereas there are no closed pitch loops in auditory space. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Participatory Democracy Social Capital and Participatory Democracy Ideal Theory Deliberative Democracy Audience Democracy Corporate Democracy Normative Claims for Democracy Concluding Remarks Notes References.

David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement presents a partial theory of distributive justice. It is partial because it applies only to the distribution of gains from joint endeavors, or what we may call the ‘social surplus’ from cooperation. This surplus is the benefit we receive from cooperation insofar as this is greater than what we might have produced through individual efforts without interaction with others. The central core of Gauthier's theory of distributive justice is his bargaining theory of ‘minimax relative concession’ (...) or MRC. Whether his theory is compelling turns essentially on whether MRC is workable and compelling. It is this issue that I wish to address. (shrink)

Abstract.Reliable Darwinian theory shows that pure altruism cannot persist and expand over time. All higher organisms show inheritable patterns of caring and discrimination. The principal forms of discriminating altruisms among human beings are individualism (different from egoism), familialism, cronyism, tribalism, and patriotism. The promiscuous altruism called “universalism” cannot endure in the face of inescapable competition. Information can be promiscuously shared, but not so matter and energy without evoking the tragedy of the commons. Universalism is not recommendable even as an ideal. (...) Survival now requires the creation of an intellectual base for a new patriotism. (shrink)

If we wish to assess the morality of elected officials, we must understand their function as our representatives and then infer how they can fulfill this function. I propose to treat the class of elected officials as a profession, so that their morality is a role morality and it is functionally determined. If we conceive the role morality of legislators to be analogous to the ethics of other professions, then this morality must be functionally defined by the purpose that legislators (...) are to fulfill once in office. Hence, the role morality of legislators will largely be determined by our theory of representation. We will need not a normative account of their role, but an empirical explanatory account. In David Hume's terms, the morality of role holders is one of “artificial” duties, that is to say, duties defined by their functional fit with the institutional purposes of a profession. Our most difficult problem, therefore, is to understand the role of our elected representatives. (shrink)

Theory and language: locating agency between free will and discursive marionettesThis article outlines a research methodology that embraces individual narratives, yet recognizes that individual narratives are nested within a backdrop of broader social and cultural understandings of who we are and how we come to understand our world. This dialectical move requires an epistemological shift, focusing on the utility of reconceptualizing the ‘environment’, not only as the social, political, or economic conditions in society, but also as language. Reconceptualizing the environment (...) as language makes it epistemologically possible to construct a bridge between varying levels of analysis, namely, between individual accounts and life stories and the cultural, social, and historical worlds from which those accounts emerge. (shrink)