Rethinking Greed

In this paper I attempt to clarify the nature of the vice of greed, focusing on what can be called “modest greed”. Agents who are modestly greedy do not long for material goods or wealth with intense desires. Rather, they have quite modest desires, but ones whose satisfaction they pursue excessively relative to other goods. Greed - including modest greed - emerges as a particularly troubling and problematic vice

Reappraising the Greed and Grievance Explanations for Violent Internal Conflict

Two phenomena have been recently utilised to explain conflict onset among rational choice analysts: greed and grievance. The former reflects elite competition over valuable natural resource rents. The latter argues that relative deprivation and the grievance it produces fuels conflict. Central to grievance are concepts of inter-ethnic or horizontal inequality. Identity formation is also crucial to intra-state conflict, as it overcomes the collective action problem. Conflict can rarely be explained by greed alone, yet, the greed versus grievance hypotheses may be complementary explanations for conflict. The greed explanation for conflict duration and secessionist wars works best in cross-country studies, but has to make way for grievance-based arguments in quantitative country-case studies. Grievances and horizontal inequalities may be better at explaining why conflicts begin, but not necessarily why they persist. Neither the presence of greed or grievance is sufficient for the outbreak of violent conflict, something which requires institutional breakdown which we describe as the failure of the social contract. The degradation of the social contract is more likely in the context of poverty and growth failure. The paper provides a synthesis of the greed and grievance hypotheses, ending with comments on post-conflict reconstruction.Conflict, civil war, greed versus grievance, social contract, post-conflict reconstruction

The Accessible Toilet Design Resource

This Accessible Toilet Design Resource has been produced from new primary research carried out within VivaCity 2020, a large university-based research consortium that is developing tools and resources to support the design of socially inclusive cities. The consortium is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). It was set up in 2003 and will complete its work in 2008. The Resource is concerned primarily with the design of the accessible toilet cubicle that should be provided for customer or public use wherever there is standard toilet provision. Though it may make reference to other types of toilet cubicles, urinals, automatic public conveniences (APCs) or grouped toilet provision, the location and design of these facilities are not addressed in great detail here. The location and design of accessible toilet facilities merits this independent, detailed scrutiny because it is essential to provide these facilities and to design them correctly, so that disabled people can participate on equal terms to able-bodied people in every aspect of city life

The Accessible Toilet Resource

Extract: This Accessible Toilet Design Resource has been produced from new primary research carried out within VivaCity 2020, a large university-based research consortium that is developing tools and resources to support the design of socially inclusive cities. The consortium is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). It was set up in 2003 and will complete its work in 2008. The Resource is concerned primarily with the design of the accessible toilet cubicle that should be provided for customer or public use wherever there is standard toilet provision. Though it may make reference to other types of toilet cubicles, urinals, automatic public conveniences (APCs) or grouped toilet provision, the location and design of these facilities are not addressed in great detail here. The location and design of accessible toilet facilities merits this independent, detailed scrutiny because it is essential to provide these facilities and to design them correctly, so that disabled people can participate on equal terms to able-bodied people in every aspect of city life

Tolkien and the Deadly Sin of Greed

Tolkien’s genius as a writer and insight as a philosopher and theologian (of sorts) are reflected in his subtle yet impactful interweaving of the consequences of greed within the lives of the peoples of Middle-Earth. He shows readers that greed is not simply the love of money. Greed is the root of all evil, and it takes a variety of forms, as represented by Sauron’s desire to possess power over and control others, Saruman’s imitative desire, and Feanor’s over-possessiveness of his sub-creative acts. Tolkien also reveals that a proper relationship with nature can provide recovery from the drab familiarity which the appropriation of nature can cause. Ultimately, Tolkien shows that in relinquishing possession of the things and people we most desire, we can find a greater sense of personhood, relationality, and peace within the world

Greed and grievance in civil wars

We investigate the causes of civil war, using a new data set of wars during 1960-99. We test a `greed’ theory focusing on the ability to finance rebellion, against a `grievance’ theory focusing on ethnic and religious divisions, political repression and inequality. We find that greed considerably outperforms grievance. Consistent with the greed theory, both dependence upon primary commodity exports and a large diaspora substantially increase the risk of conflict. Inconsistent with the grievance theory, greater ethnic and religious diversity reduce the risk of conflict. The results are robust to correction for outliers, alternative variable definition, and variations in estimation method.Conflict, Development, Natural Resources, Panel Data

The Quotative in Bashkir

Evidentiality is a widely researched category in contemporary linguistics, both from the viewpoint of grammatical expression and also that of semantics/pragmatics. Amongst markers expressing information source is the illocutionary evidential quotative, which codes a speech report with an explicit reference to the quoted source. This article investigates the quotative particle tip in Bashkir, a Kipchak-Bulgar Turkic language spoken in the Russian Federation. In its default quotative meaning, tip signals direct speech and functions as a syntactic complementiser. This function was found to have extended from spoken utterances to coding thoughts and experiences in the context of semi-direct speech. A separate function of tip is its use as an adverbialiser signalling a logical relation and conveying the meaning of intention/purpose. Different categories were found to interact in the functions of tip. In the context of semi-direct speech, the meaning tip conveys is linked with the semantic dimension of subjectivity, which pertains to the cognitive processing and expressing of information by the speaker/experiencer. The interplay of the marker tip was investigated in conjunction with ten complement-taking verbs, whose degree and strength of subjectivity were found to range from neutral to strong. When combined with küreü ‘see’, tip introduces visual ambiguity and epistemic uncertainty, for example, in dream scenes. With the verbs beleü ‘know’ and išeteü ‘hear’, tip conveys a multisubjective meaning: in addition to signalling what the experiential subject has heard or found out, the marker also codes the involvement of some other subject, the original source, thus giving voice to multiple speakers and merging them

A neural perspective on when and why trait greed comes at the expense of others

Depending on the point of view, conceptions of greed range from being a desirable and inevitable feature of a well-regulated, well-balanced economy to the root of all evil - radix omnium malorum avaritia (Tim 6.10). Regarding the latter, it has been proposed that greedy individuals strive for obtaining desired goods at all costs. Here, we show that trait greed predicts selfish economic decisions that come at the expense of others in a resource dilemma. This effect was amplified when individuals strived for obtaining real money, as compared to points, and when their revenue was at the expense of another person, as compared to a computer. On the neural level, we show that individuals high, compared to low in trait greed showed a characteristic signature in the EEG, a reduced P3 effect to positive, compared to negative feedback, indicating that they may have a lack of sensitivity to adjust behavior according to positive and negative stimuli from the environment. Brain-behavior relations further confirmed this lack of sensitivity to behavior adjustment as a potential underlying neuro-cognitive mechanism which explains selfish and reckless behavior that may come at the expense of others