Facing Up To Scarcity

Download or read book Facing Up to Scarcity written by Barbara H. Fried and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-27 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Facing Up to Scarcity offers a powerful critique of the nonconsequentialist approaches that have been dominant in Anglophone moral and political thought over the last fifty years. In these essays Barbara H. Fried examines the leading schools of contemporary nonconsequentialist thought, including Rawlsianism, Kantianism, libertarianism, and social contractarianism. In the realm of moral philosophy, she argues that nonconsequentialist theories grounded in the sanctity of "individual reasons" cannot solve the most important problems taken to be within their domain. Those problems, which arise from irreducible conflicts among legitimate (and often identical) individual interests, can be resolved only through large-scale interpersonal trade-offs of the sort that nonconsequentialism foundationally rejects. In addition to scrutinizing the internal logic of nonconsequentialist thought, Fried considers the disastrous social consequences when nonconsequentialist intuitions are allowed to drive public policy. In the realm of political philosophy, she looks at the treatment of distributive justice in leading nonconsequentialist theories. Here one can design distributive schemes roughly along the lines of the outcomes favoured--but those outcomes are not logically entailed by the normative premises from which they are ostensibly derived, and some are extraordinarily strained interpretations of those premises. Fried concludes, as a result, that contemporary nonconsequentialist political philosophy has to date relied on weak justifications for some very strong conclusions.

Download or read book Facing Up to Scarcity written by Barbara H. Fried and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barbara H. Fried presents a powerful critique of the nonconsequentialist approaches that have been dominant in recent Anglophone moral and political thought. She argues that nonconsequentialist theories have disastrous consequences in the political domain and are inadequate at dealing with conflicts of individual interests in the moral domain.

Download or read book Scarcity written by Sendhil Mullainathan and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A surprising and intriguing examination of how scarcity—and our flawed responses to it—shapes our lives, our society, and our culture

Download or read book The Last Oasis written by Sandra Postel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-16 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades now we have wasted and mismanaged the world?s water supplies. Today, 27 countries are short of water, a quarter of the world?s population has no safe water, 46 per cent have no proper sanitation and each year four million children die of water-borne diseases. As most of the world?s major river systems cross several national boundaries, the scope disputes and the threat to international security is becoming more and more real. In The Last Oasis, Sandra Postel examines the economic, ecological and political factors affecting fresh water supply. She confronts the issues of mismanagement and profligacy and analyses and dangers of confrontation, both between nations and between rural and urban users. She also emphasises that the technology and know-how for effective water husbandry does exist. With methods already in use, farmers could cut their demand for water by 40-90 per cent, and cities by one-third, without sacrificing economic output or quality of life. Investing in water efficiency, recycling and conservation help meet rising demands and stave off disaster. But the priority is a common recognition of the gravity of the position, and with that a widespread push for institutions to manage sustainable use of water.

Download or read book In Line Behind a Billion People written by Damien Ma and published by Pearson Education. This book was released on 2014 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors set out each of the scarcities that could limit China's power and stall its progress. Beyond scarcities of natural resources and public goods, they explore China's persistent poverties of individual freedoms, institutions, and ideological appeal--and the corrosive loss of values among a growing middle class shackled by a parochial and inflexible political system.

Download or read book The Coming Age of Scarcity written by Michael N. Dobkowski and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1998-03-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Dobkowski and Isidor Walliman have edited a book that, although ominous, is not a fatalistic look at the future. The Coming Age of Scarcity lays out the perils of not recognizing the reality of genocide or of acknowledging the full implications of warfare. Showing how scarcity and surplus populations can lead to disaster, The Coming Age of Scarcity is about evil. It tells of "ethnic cleansing" and excavates the world's expanding killing fields. The writers in this volume are all too aware that the future suggests that present-day population growth, land resources, energy consumption, and per capita consumption cannot be sustained without leading to greater catastrophes. The essays in this volume ask: What is the solution in the face of mass death and genocide? As philosopher John K. Roth says in the Foreword, "The essays can sensitize us against despair and indifference because history shows that human-made mass death and genocide are not inevitable, and no events related to them will ever be."

Download or read book The Limits to Scarcity written by Lyla Mehta and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scarcity is considered a ubiquitous feature of the human condition. It underpins much of modern economics and is widely used as an explanation for social organisation, social conflict and the resource crunch confronting humanity's survival on the planet. It is made out to be an all-pervasive fact of our lives - be it of housing, food, water or oil. But has the conception of scarcity been politicized, naturalized, and universalized in academic and policy debates? Has overhasty recourse to scarcity evoked a standard set of market, institutional and technological solutions which have blocked out political contestations, overlooking access as a legitimate focus for academic debates as well as policies and interventions? Theoretical and empirical chapters by leading academics and scholar-activists grapple with these issues by questioning scarcity's taken-for-granted nature. They examine scarcity debates across three of the most important resources - food, water and energy - and their implications for theory, institutional arrangements, policy responses and innovation systems. The book looks at how scarcity has emerged as a totalizing discourse in both the North and South. The 'scare' of scarcity has led to scarcity emerging as a political strategy for powerful groups. Aggregate numbers and physical quantities are trusted, while local knowledges and experiences of scarcity that identify problems more accurately and specifically are ignored. Science and technology are expected to provide 'solutions', but such expectations embody a multitude of unexamined assumptions about the nature of the 'problem', about the technologies and about the institutional arrangements put forward as a 'fix.' Through this examination the authors demonstrate that scarcity is not a natural condition: the problem lies in how we see scarcity and the ways in which it is socially generated.