Pragmatist Ethics and Climate Change [preprint]

This chapter explores some features of pragmatic pluralism as an ethical perspective on climate change. It is inspired in part by Andrew Light’s work on climate diplomacy as U.S. Assistant Secretary of Energy for International Affairs, and by Bryan Norton’s environmental pragmatism, while drawing more explicitly than Light or Norton from classical pragmatist sources such as John Dewey. The primary aim of the chapter is to characterize, differentiate, and advance a general pragmatist approach to climate ethics. The main line of argument is that we are suffering culturally from a sort of “moral jetlag” due in part to “moral fundamentalist” habits, and that a critical focus on pragmatic pluralism—in moral theory generally and climate ethics particularly—would be salutary for our recovery if philosophers are to speak more effectively to “wicked problems” in a way that aids public deliberation and social learning. Moral fundamentalist habits, and the monistic one-way assumption that unintentionally—but not blamelessly—exercises and unduly reinforces them, are obstacles to fostering habits of moral and political inquiry better suited to dealing with predicaments rapidly transforming our warming planet

Leadership, innovation and strategy development in military hard structures: Bringing chaos to order

This thesis is a critical engagement with the development of leadership for officers in the United States Air Force (USAF) at the USAF’s Air University (AU) through specially designed graduate level education courses in leadership and innovation. These programs have been in regular demand and requests for their dissemination to various other parts of the military are frequent. They are also the seed bed for a number of change initiatives and graduates are to be found at the highest level of decision making. This responsibility to anticipate the future and contribute to supporting officers to lead in increasing complexity, requires me to be constantly questioning myself, my own leadership, my ideas and the ideas of others to inform the design and ongoing evolution of these programs. This evolution is nudged not only from questioning but from the input of students, faculty, and staff in a collaborative endeavor. The context is leadership in, what I refer to as, a ‘hard structure’, one that is heavily regulated and bureaucratized with non-negotiable expectations of its members in service to the protection of systems of security, from economy and law enforcement to trade and civil liberties. In the context of this particular hard structure of the military, the mandate to safeguard a nation’s institutions and alliances can also be a mandate to kill on small and large scales, if ordered to, in the interests of national and international security. This critique has brought into greater awareness the ambiguities, contradictions, and paradoxes faced by military leadership; it questions whether existing formulaic models are relevant to practice in field conditions and tracks my search for concepts as translational devices to negotiate opposing tensions and to see the possibilities in ‘the middle way’. I collaborate with students, peers, and literature to enable leadership and innovation education to shift from a monoperspective to a multi-perspective lens and from leadership as some form of mono-discipline to a multidisciplinary one. I explore the relevance of approaches and concepts including transdisciplinary perspectives as complementary ways to approach leadership for the future. While innovation is part of the leadership portfolio, I arrive at the need to introduce strategy into that portfolio and have set in motion an initiative to integrate all three into a Master’s program that stretches not only the skills of young officers but their imagination. I can now articulate more clearly the concepts, ideas and distilled experience that informs the content and the delivery of the leadership and innovation programs– a transparency of my own understanding including (i) context is pivotal (ii) once leaders understand and are comfortable with their ‘being’ they will be confident to seek cognitive diversity to complement any perceived or actual ‘weaknesses’ in themselves (iii) this in turn results in strong, cohesive teams where individuals can feel less inhibited in expressing and comprehending their strengths and can strive to help each other flourish with an understanding that leaders can only be as great as the teams they create

The Evolution and Vitality of Merger Presumptions: A Decision-Theoretic Approach

This article reviews the formulation and evolution of the Philadelphia National Bank anticompetitive presumption through the lens of decision theory and Bayes Law. It explains how the economic theory, empirical evidence and experience are used to determine a presumption and how that presumption interacts with the reliability of relevant evidence to rationally set the appropriate burden of production and burden of persuasion to rebut the presumption. The article applies this reasoning to merger presumptions. It also sketches out a number of non-market share structural factors that might be used to supplement or replace the current legal and enforcement presumptions for mergers. It also discusses the potential for conflicting presumptions and how such conflicts might best be resolved

Information Outlook, December 2001

Volume 5, Issue 12https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2001/1011/thumbnail.jp

The Amphibian, Melioristic Agenda for Dividuals: Tropological Oscillations versus Tropological Settlements

Some people often identify themselves too strongly with one particular belief system. Others, throughout their lives, travel from one belief system to another without necessarily weaving their experiences and gained bodies of knowledge in a complementary manner. This thesis discusses different frequencies and principles of this sort of settlements or oscillations. I argue that it is impossible to believe in perfectly purist ideologies that would not deviate from their putative, pre-established, holistic inner order. Through multiple literary, cinematic, and philosophical examples it is shown that people are of dividual (not individual) nature. That is to say, potentially we contain multiple dividual poles such as hedgehog versus fox, character versus author/agent, and different levels of authorship/agency, and a very large number of tropologies – a small, coherent system of different tropes that revolve around one axial trope – such as noise, silence, laughter, etc. Our level of authorship/agency depends on how often we oscillate between different dividual and tropological poles and how close is our relationship with them. These terms also allow us to look at the problem of determinism and free will from a slightly different conceptual angle. This may pose two traditional questions: (i) Why act at all, if we are tropologically conditioned? (ii) What could be constructive principles for action? This thesis argues that even though we are incapable of controlling and predicted the consequences of people’s actions (entropology), we may still follow the principle of melioristic, amphibian, tropological and dividual oscillations and hope for serendipitous outcomes. Examples and cases from the areas of literature, arts, philosophy, and cultural studies used in this thesis seek to provide a rich conceptual framework and gain new synthesized perspectives. Comparisons of old and new intellectual production helps us understand why tropological and dividual oscillations are inevitable and more desirable than tropological and dividual settlements

A nationwide assessment of hepatocellular adenoma resection:Indications and pathological discordance

Hepatocellular adenomas (HCAs) are benign liver tumors associated with bleeding or malignant transformation. Data on the indication for surgery are scarce. We analyzed indications and outcome of patients operated for HCAs 50 mm (52%), suspicion of (pre)malignancy (28%), and (previous) bleeding (5.1%). No difference was observed in HCA-subtype distribution between small and large tumors. Ninety-six (43%) patients had a postoperative change in diagnosis. Independent risk factors for change in diagnosis were tumor size <50 mm (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 3.4; p < 0.01), male sex (aOR, 3.7; p = 0.03), and lack of hepatobiliary contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (CE-MRI) (aOR, 1.8; p = 0.04). Resection for small (suspected) HCAs was mainly indicated by suspicion of (pre)malignancy, whereas for large (suspected) HCAs, tumor size was the most prevalent indication. Male sex, tumor size <50 mm, and lack of hepatobiliary CE-MRI were independent risk factors for postoperative change in tumor diagnosis