Principles of Equality: Managing Equality and Diversity in a Steiner School

Principles of equality are examined in the context of managing equality and diversity in practice. Our case study is the Cardiff Steiner School, an independent international school located in Wales, UK with educational values guided by the philosophers and educationalists Rudolf Steiner and Millicent Mackenzie. The sustainable management referred to and assessed in this chapter is the School’s management structure and the related School pedagogical operation, with the founding Steiner value of human justice informing these. We argue that at this School the management of equality and diversity reflects theories of Diversity and Equality Management, with School managers aspiring to encourage respect for all. We appraise the philosophical and spiritual values of the founders in relation to equality and diversity, in order to demonstrate the visionary ideals of these philosophers and the extent to which their beliefs live on sustainably in contemporary society, and particularly in a Steiner education community

Futurity, selves and further organisms

Most aspects of Treves et al.’s target article are commendable, but I would suggest: explicitly including (1) Singer’s ‘equal interests’ principle; adjusting (2) Mathews’s principle of ‘bioproportionality’; and clarifying the implications of (3) Parfit’s Non-Identity Problem, (4) the limits of present predictions of future needs, and (5) the application of the concept of selves to biotic individuals. There is also a problem about (6) how plants are to be individuated

Generaciones futuras: Considerando todas las partes afectadas

1. In this essay, I explore an aspect of consequentialism that cannot altogether be ignored by rival theories of normative ethics, namely the range of the parties affected by current actions, and the importance of taking these parties into account. Even those rival theories that discount some interests need a clear understanding of the nature of the interests that they proceed to discount. 2. Affected interests include the future interests of actual people and human foetuses, plus those of actual non-human creatures, and also those of future people and other creatures who cannot yet be identified. Human actions will playa large role in determining not only which humans there will be but also which non-humans; for all of these we can considerably influence the quality of life, and thus have responsibilities for the foreseeable impacts of what we do. 3. Where we make a comparable and discoverable difference to people's quality of life, we are no less responsible if they are situated in the future than in the present. Further, if we accept that the foreseeable costs of a hundred years hence matter as much as costs of the same kind in the present, then the scale of current responsibilities turns out to be vast. Those who grant this are for practical purposes consequentialists already. 4. Donald Brown has shown how there is a strong case from human interests for stabilising greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in the atmosphere, further strengthened by biocentric and/or ecocentric considerations. Pace Brown, a biocentric approach can weigh human interests (such as development ones) against non-human interests, and need not forbid all species extinctions; but in fact this approach still cannot justify increases to GHG concentrations. Emissions required for Third World development need to be matched by reduced emissions in developed countries. Biocentric consequentialism thus generates defensible policies. Also, as Brown holds, developed countries have obligations to support a strict international climate change agreement, with national quotas based on equal per capita emissions entitlements world-wide.1. En este ensayo voy a explorar un aspecto del consecuencialismo que no debería ser ignorado completamente por las teorías rivales de la ética normativa, a saber, la extensión del ámbito de los individuos afectados por nuestras acciones presentes, y la importancia de tener en cuenta a los mismos. Incluso aquellas teorías rivales que descuentan algunos intereses necesitan una clara comprensión de la naturaleza de los intereses que están dispuestos a desechar. 2. Los intereses afectados incluyen los intereses futuros de personas actuales y de fetos humanos, además de aquellos relativos a criaturas actuales no humanas, y también los de personas futuras y otras criaturas que no pueden ser reconocidos todavía. Las acciones humanas jugarán un importante rol a la hora de determinar no sólo qué humanos existirán, sino incluso qué no-humanos; podemos incluso influir considerablemente en la calidad de vida de todos ellos, y asumir así responsabilidades en relación a los impactos previsibles resultantes de nuestras acciones. 3. En la medida que establezcamos diferencias comparativas y constatables respecto a la calidad de vida de la gente, conviene advertir que no somos menos responsables de los individuos del futuro que del presente. Es más, si aceptamos que los costes previsibles (de nuestras acciones) para dentro de un millón de años importan tanto como los costes del mismo tipo en el presente, entonces la escala de nuestras responsabilidades actuales se hace más vasta. 4. Donald Brown ha mostrado cómo hay un fuerte debate entre los diversos intereses humanos a la hora de establecer cuáles han de ser las concentraciones de gas invernadero en la atmósfera; dicho debate ha sido reanima" do aún más por consideraciones biocéntricas y/o ecocéntricas. Pace Brown, una aproximación biocéntrica puede contra" pesar intereses humanos (tales como los que afectan al desarrollo) con intereses no humanos, y no tendría por qué prohibir todas las extinciones de especies; pero de hecho esta aproximación no podría justificar de ningún modo el incremento de las concentraciones de gases invernadero. Las emisiones requeridas para el desarrollo del Tercer Mundo necesitan ser contrapesadas con la reducción de emisiones en los países desarrollados. El consecuencialismo biocéntrico genera así políticas defendibles. También, como Brown subraya, los países desarrollados tienen obligación de apoyar un estricto acuerdo internacional sobre el cambio climático, con cuotas nacionales basadas en habilitaciones (entitlements) a una igual cantidad de emisiones per capita para todo planeta

The Virus and the Environment: The Problem of Sustaining Unexpected Gains

The coronavirus pandemic has had some unexpected benign effects (including a large drop in air pollution and levels of nitrogen oxides in UK and elsewhere, and a smaller drop in global carbon emissions), which raises the problem of how to sustain and build on these unexpected gains. These gains could easily be lost when economies and road transport return to something like their previous condition. But if governments and industries are inspired to reduce automobile emissions to match the levels of the spring of 2020, gains such as these could become recurrent, and many more lives could be saved. Further, if (with greater effort) carbon emissions could remain reduced, then future generations could be saved from sea-level rise, extreme weather events, and even from the spread of tropical diseases. Such a prevention of disease would be an ironic but welcome gain from a pandemic

Popper and Xenophanes

Karl Popper identified Xenophanes of Colophon (570−478 BCE) as the originator of the method of conjectures and refutations. This essay explores this claim, and the methods of both philosophers (section 1). Disparagement (ancient and modern) of Xenophanes has been misguided (section 2). Xenophanes, a critical rationalist and realist, pioneered philosophy of religion (section 3) and epistemology (section 4), but his method was not confined to falsificationism, and appears compatible with inductivism and abductionism (section 5). The method employed by Popper in interpreting Herodotus in support of his conjectures about Xenophanes is typical of the multiple-strand reasoning characteristic of the humanities, and is as much inductivist or abductionist as refutationist (section 6). Popper’s theories about Xenophanes are convincing; but even if Popperians would claim that Popper’s refutationism largely fits the natural sciences, his application of it to history is implausible, and conflicts with own practice (section 7). An appendix reflects on Popper’s interest in cultured refugees

Clarke, Collins and compounds

Can room be found in between the matter and void of a Newtonian universe for an immaterial and immortal soul? Can followers of Locke with his agnosticism about the nature of substances claim to know that some of them are immaterial? Samuel Clarke, well versed in Locke's thought and a defender both of Newtonian science and Christian orthodoxy, believed he could do both and attempted to prove his case by means of some hard-boiled reductionism. Anthony Collins, a deist whose only lapse from materialism concerned God himself, rejected Clarke's argument. In this paper I discuss their controversy' in order to bring out the state of debate about material systems and consciousness among people influenced by Locke and Newton in the early eighteenth century, and I also assess Clarke's reductionist premise, as he himself frequently invites "the impartial reader" to do

Deep time and environmental ethics

This paper employs the concept of deep time to supply a philosophical argument about the kind of environmental ethics required in the present. Considerations from the evolutionary past are deployed to support the intrinsic value of health and well-being in addition to that of pleasure. The well-being of a species is held to consist in that of its individual members, past, present and future. Duties to species accordingly include promoting the well-being of future species members, since the impacts of human actions in a technological age are spread out across the future. These impacts include impacts on non-human species after humanity has become extinct; if these impacts matter, then a non-anthropocentric ethic is needed to explain why they do, since an anthropocentric ethics is incapable of explaining this

Reasons for resisting Darwinism, and why they should not be credited

Plantinga argues that Darwinism implies that we cannot help adopting our apparently reflective beliefs, and that this is a reason for rejecting Darwinism. I argue that similar arguments apparently apply to the beliefs crucial to deliberation, meaningful work, meaningful relationships, meaningful communication and creativity. But these arguments apply to deterministic versions of Darwinism only. Cogent non-deterministic versions have been propounded by Popper, Rose, Lewontin, Ward and Miller (those of Ward and Miller being theistic versions). These versions are presented, as is Midgley’s account of how evolution has endowed us with a mix of desires that prepare the way for choice. Plantinga-type arguments pose no problem for such non-deterministic Darwinisms

Balthasar Bekker and the decline of the witch-craze: The old demonology and the new philosophy

Through a survey of the discussions of the decline of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-craze of Hugh Trevor-Roper, Keith Thomas and Brian Easlea, the role and impact of Balthasar Bekker, a seventeenth-century Dutch Cartesian, is shown to have been under-estimated, and not inconsiderable