Normative Judgment and Rational Requirements: A Reply to Ridge

I examine and rebut Ridge’s two arguments for Capacity Judgment Internalism (simply qua their particular character and content, first person normative judgments are necessarily capable of motivating without the help of any independent desire). First, the rejection of the possibility of anormativism (sec. 2), second, an argument from the rational requirement to intend to do as one judges that one ought to do (sec. 3). I conclude with a few remarks about the nature of this requirement and about verdicts of akrasia. (sec. 4)

The Joint Vienna Institute

"How does the intellectual role played by international training organisations fit into the contemporary architecture of global governance? The international diffusion of economic policy ideas represents one of the core dimensions of contemporary global governance, which has generated heated controversy in recent years with international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank castigated for championing a ‘one-size-fits-all’ brand of neoliberal economic reform. Yet while substantial scholarly attention has focused on analysing the effects of the formal compliance mechanisms that the IMF and the World Bank rely on to implement neoliberal policy changes in borrowing countries, such as loan conditionality, less attention has been devoted to exploring the intermediate avenues through which neoliberal ideas travel from global governance institutions to national governance contexts. This article aims to address this gap in the study of contemporary global governance and neoliberal policy diffusion through critically examining the evolving role of the Joint Vienna Institute (JVI), an international training organisation set up after the end of the Cold War to transmit global ‘best practice’ economic policy ideas to national officials in post-communist economies.

Sewerage: a return to basics to benefit the poor

Around 2.8 billion people, mostly in developing countries, currently lack adequate sanitation. Approximately half live in urban areas, where the most appropriate sanitation solution is commonly simplified sewerage. This paper presents the rigorous hydraulic design basis of simplified sewerage and compares this design approach with that used in the UK for conventional sewerage. It reviews simplified sewerage construction and how this achieves major cost savings and also avoids the problems commonly experienced with manholes

What’s wrong with ‘mental’ disorders? : a commentary on ‘What is a mental/psychiatric disorder? : from DSM-IV to DSM-V’ by Stein et al

The editorial by Stein et al. (2010) is timely and relevant given the development of DSM-V and the likely impact that such a development will have on mental health services in the USA. The revision of the DSM will also affect international psychiatric research and global practice thanks to the interplay between the development of DSM and ICD (Fulford & Sartorius, 2009). The editorial by Stein and colleagues is very rich and there are many themes suitable for further examination and discussion. For this response, however, we have chosen to focus on two themes: the use of the term ‘mental’ and the idea of psychiatric disorders being ‘in’ an individual

Moral responsibility and mental illness : a case study

Various authors have argued that progress in the neurocognitive and neuropsychiatric sciences might threaten the commonsense understanding of how the mind generates behavior, and, as a consequence, it might also threaten the commonsense ways of attributing moral responsibility, if not the very notion of moral responsibility. In the case of actions that result in undesirable outcomes (e.g., someone being harmed), the commonsense conception—which is reflected in sophisticated ways in the legal conception—tells us that there are circumstances in which the agent is entirely and fully responsible for the bad outcome (and deserves to be punished accordingly) and circumstances in which the agent is not at all responsible for the bad outcome (and thereby the agent does not deserve to be punished)