Conflict of Values

As argued recently in Forum for Development Studies, a ‘back to the barriers’ approach to biodiversity conservation is again prevalent, after some two decades of emphasis on ‘community-based’ initiatives. This involves the establishment and expansion of national parks from which people are variously excluded. In this article, however, I suggest that community-based approaches such as Community-Based Natural Resources Management (CBNRM) remain important, and in many ways simply constitute the other side of the same coin of modern conservation practice under the political and economic, and cultural, value-frame of neoliberalism. My aim is to highlight some shared conceptualisations
and rationalisations regarding perceptions of ‘the environment’ and of
people–environment relationships that inform both of these two broad-brush policy and practical orientations towards ‘biodiversity conservation’. The article thus draws on a Foucaultian analytics to ‘problematise’ the contemporary and globalising neoliberal episteme within which both these approaches are produced; and to open a space where orientations (towards ‘the environment’) that are ‘othered’ and thereby silenced by this frame might be articulated.

Keywords: biodiversity conservation, neoliberalism, Foucault, problematise, episteme, Community-Based Natural Resources Management (CBNRM), environment, globalisation, ‘other’, incommensurable values, sustainability

The present work intends to serve as an introduction to the social thought and the historical ethics of the German intellectual Gustav von Schmoller (1838-1917), an important member of the Social Policy Association (VereinfürSocialpolitik) and a prominent historian in the German Empire by the end of the nineteenth and in the beginning of the twentieth centuries. By first releasing an explanatory biography, a historical contextualization of the forming of the so-called "New" German Historical School of Economics with the understanding of its social-historical backgrounds will then be intended. In a second part, a discussion of the scholar's theoretical and methodological presuppositions related to the issue of ethics and objectivity in the historical knowledge in its association to the social issues will latter be proposed. Finally, considering  nineteenth-century philosophical debates around "values" in humanities knowledge production, Schmoller's position against those and other epismological challenges of the modern era will then be analyzed. 

What's Important is about Values Perspectives: a different way of looking at and working with values, whether you want to really understand what drives your own life and work choices; or if you want to build a foundation of shared values energy with your team, or, align your organization behind a truly shared sense of purpose. Values Perspectives is a twofold approach, supported by an online values survey. It looks, in a non-judgmental way, at both your highest-priority values--your real values--and at the worldview-lens that colors how you interpret your values, and the values of others around you. This book is about why that matters, and how to understand and work with values to get the most out of them. What's Important is also a practical handbook for the coach, counselor, teacher, internal or external consultant and change agent who knows that values are our deepest drivers, and that values can unlock immense potential for self-awareness, communication, influence and positive group energy when we know how.

Late capitalism—marked by the increased financialization, commodification, and industrialization of all sectors of lived experience—re-presents for us daily the universality of a world system whose flagrant concentration of wealth jeopardizes the continuity of life itself. This process has its origin in the dawn of philosophy, developing as the logical consequence of an ego-driven will to power: the archetypal dimensions of symbolic consciousness constitute an evolutionary force imaginatively determining the future according to its own constitutive motivations. This presentation draws from ancient and modern philosophical insights into the nature of power, property, and profit, attempting to “raise” into collective consciousness those spiritual truths that call us to attune to (the vibrational resonance patterns of) an unbounded cosmic-erotic energeia.

In this paper I examine Bernard Williams’ claim that an appealing conception of love can come into conflict with impartial morality. First, I explain how Williams’ claim can survive one strategy (Marcia Baron’s idea of a ‘counterfactual condition’) to head off the possibility of conflict. I then examine J.D.Velleman’s Kantian conception of love as another possible way to reject Williams’ claim. I argue, however, that Velleman’s attempt to transcend love’s partiality in his account of love produces an unappealing and unconvincing ideal. This is made particularly clear, I suggest, by the analysis that Velleman is forced to give of the kind of case that generated Williams’ observations in the first place. Thus Velleman’s account should be rejected.

‘It is necessary to a Prince to learn how not to be good’. This quotation from Machiavelli’s The Prince has become the mantra of the standard dirty hands (DH) thesis. Despite its infamy, it features proudly in most conventional expositions of the dirty hands (DH) problem, including Michael Walzer’s original analysis. In this paper, I wish to cast a doubt as to whether the standard conception of the problem of DH—the recognition that, in certain inescapable and tragic circumstances an innocent course of action is unfeasible—fully captures Machiavelli’s message and its terrifying implications. In particular, I argue that the standard DH thesis is inadequately ‘static’: it conceives the conflict between ordinary morality and political morality as a stark, momentary and rare paradox of action—an anomaly disrupting the normality of harmony. As such it misconceives both the extent and the nature of the rupture between morality and politics. In this sense, the argument I shall advance does just involve an exercise in the history of political thought. Rather, I want to suggest that, by virtue of its failure to take Machiavelli’s insights seriously, the standard DH thesis fails to live up to its purported capacity to capture the complexity and fragmentation of our moral cosmos and that, consequently, it is nothing more than a thinly veiled version of the idealism and monism it purports to reject.

Large numbers of educated, reflective people worldwide have become aware over the last generation that the globalization of extreme material wealth cannot be sustained.  In this awareness people differ from previous human generations where the prevailing belief was that economic growth (a.k.a. “progress”) was a good thing. In previous generations the political passions focused on how wealth was to be divided up – hence the broad labels of agrarian landlordism, market capitalism, crony capitalism, socialism, national socialism … and so on. Segments of present populations have decided that all prior  ideologies were variations on a global ponzi  scheme which is approaching its moment of collapse. That collapse might be expressed in the depletion of material resources, in ecological failure, or in the sheer breakdown through over-complexity of systems which failure-prone humans simply cannot manage.  Whatever the looming breakdown point in any given locale or society, the focus of political dispute becomes “what is to be done”?