On Justification, Idealization, and Discursive Purchase

Conceptions of acceptability-based moral or political justification take it that authoritative acceptability, widely conceived, constitutes, or contributes to, validity, or justification. There is no agreement as to what bar for authoritativeness such justification may employ. The paper engages the issue in relation to (i) the level of idealization that a bar for authoritativeness, ψ, imparts to a standard of acceptability-based justification, S, and (ii) the degree of discursive purchase of the discursive standing that S accords to people when it builds ψ. I argue that (i) and (ii) are interdependent: high idealization values entail low discursive purchase, while high degrees of purchase require low idealization values. I then distinguish between alethic conceptions of justification that prioritize ends that commit to high idealization values, and recognitive conceptions that favor high discursive purchase. On this basis, I argue for a moderately recognitivist constraint on idealization. To render the recognitive discursive minimum available to relevant people at the site of justification, S should set ψ low enough so that it is a genuine option for actual people to reject relevant views in ways that S recognizes as authoritative. (The Appendix applies this to a Forst-type view of reciprocity of reasons to draw out some limitations of this view.) [Draft available from author on request.

Zebrafish Endzone Regulates Neural Crest-Derived Chromatophore Differentiation and Morphology

The development of neural crest-derived pigment cells has been studied extensively as a model for cellular differentiation, disease and environmental adaptation. Neural crest-derived chromatophores in the zebrafish (Danio rerio) consist of three types: melanophores, xanthophores and iridiphores. We have identified the zebrafish mutant endzone (enz), that was isolated in a screen for mutants with neural crest development phenotypes, based on an abnormal melanophore pattern. We have found that although wild-type numbers of chromatophore precursors are generated in the first day of development and migrate normally in enz mutants, the numbers of all three chromatophore cell types that ultimately develop are reduced. Further, differentiated melanophores and xanthophores subsequently lose dendricity, and iridiphores are reduced in size. We demonstrate that enz function is required cell autonomously by melanophores and that the enz locus is located on chromosome 7. In addition, zebrafish enz appears to selectively regulate chromatophore development within the neural crest lineage since all other major derivatives develop normally. Our results suggest that enz is required relatively late in the development of all three embryonic chromatophore types and is normally necessary for terminal differentiation and the maintenance of cell size and morphology. Thus, although developmental regulation of different chromatophore sublineages in zebrafish is in part genetically distinct, enz provides an example of a common regulator of neural crest-derived chromatophore differentiation and morphology

Synthesising Corporate Responsibility on Organisational and Societal Levels of Analysis: An Integrative Perspective

This article develops an integrative perspective on corporate responsibility by synthesising competing perspectives on the responsibility of the corporation at the organisational and societal levels of analysis. We review three major corporate responsibility perspectives, which we refer to as economic, critical, and politico-ethical. We analyse the major potential uses and pitfalls of the perspectives, and integrate the debate on these two levels. Our synthesis concludes that when a society has a robust division of moral labour in place, the responsibility of a corporation may be economic (as suggested under the economic perspective) without jeopardising democracy and sustainability (as reported under the critical perspective). Moreover, the economic role of corporations neither signifies the absence of deliberative democratic mechanisms nor business practices extending beyond compliance (as called for under the politico-ethical perspective). The study underscores the value of integrating different perspectives and multiple levels of analysis to present comprehensive descriptions and prescriptions of the responsibility phenomenon

Incorporating concepts of inequality and inequity into health benefits analysis

BACKGROUND: Although environmental policy decisions are often based in part on both risk assessment information and environmental justice concerns, formalized approaches for addressing inequality or inequity when estimating the health benefits of pollution control have been lacking. Inequality indicators that fulfill basic axioms and agree with relevant definitions and concepts in health benefits analysis and environmental justice analysis can allow for quantitative examination of efficiency-equality tradeoffs in pollution control policies. METHODS: To develop appropriate inequality indicators for health benefits analysis, we provide relevant definitions from the fields of risk assessment and environmental justice and consider the implications. We evaluate axioms proposed in past studies of inequality indicators and develop additional axioms relevant to this context. We survey the literature on previous applications of inequality indicators and evaluate five candidate indicators in reference to our proposed axioms. We present an illustrative pollution control example to determine whether our selected indicators provide interpretable information. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that an inequality indicator for health benefits analysis should not decrease when risk is transferred from a low-risk to high-risk person, and that it should decrease when risk is transferred from a high-risk to low-risk person (Pigou-Dalton transfer principle), and that it should be able to have total inequality divided into its constituent parts (subgroup decomposability). We additionally propose that an ideal indicator should avoid value judgments about the relative importance of transfers at different percentiles of the risk distribution, incorporate health risk with evidence about differential susceptibility, include baseline distributions of risk, use appropriate geographic resolution and scope, and consider multiple competing policy alternatives. Given these criteria, we select the Atkinson index as the single indicator most appropriate for health benefits analysis, with other indicators useful for sensitivity analysis. Our illustrative pollution control example demonstrates how these indices can help a policy maker determine control strategies that are dominated from an efficiency and equality standpoint, those that are dominated for some but not all societal viewpoints on inequality averseness, and those that are on the optimal efficiency-equality frontier, allowing for more informed pollution control policies