Many philosophers who endorse an environmental ethic are uneasy with animal protectionist philosophies. They reject sentientism – the view that sentience is necessary and sufficient for moral considerability – in favor of biocentrism, the view that being alive is necessary and sufficient for moral considerability. It is difficult to characterize both sentience and being alive in ways that are both informative and noncontroversial. Some environmental philosophers reject the individualism of both these views, and embrace instead holistic views that place such entities as ecosystems at the center of moral concern. Deep ecologists go even further, making it difficult to know how to live in accordance with their principles. Such views provide insight, but seem to abandon the fundamental questions of ethics.

The first twenty years of international negotiation on climate change took an approach that was guaranteed to fail: attempting to solve an immensely complex issue through a single, legally binding agreement. The history of diplomacy in trade and security shows that success requires a different approach: breaking a problem up into manageable parts, and growing agreement gradually, strengthening it as parties’ interests increasingly converge.

A core justification for the electoral college, and its violations of political equality, is that it is necessary to protect important interests that would be overlooked or harmed under a system of direct election of the president. Yet such claims are based on faulty premises. States—including states with small populations—do not embody coherent, unified interests and communities, and they have little need for protection. Even if they did, the electoral college does not provide it. Contrary to the claims of its supporters, candidates do not pay attention to small states. The electoral college actually distorts the campaign by discouraging candidates from paying attention to small states and to much of the rest of the country as well. Instead, they devote their attention to competitive states. It is also the case that people of color do not benefit from the electoral college, because they are not well positioned to determine the outcomes in states. As a result, the electoral college system discourages attention to their interests. It does, however, provide the potential for any cohesive special interest concentrated in a large, competitive state to exercise disproportionate power.

This chapter addresses the book’s first question by focusing on the Realist critique of classical Pragmatism. This insists that political interests corrupt processes of social learning and argues that power determines how best practice (and the public good) is defined. This criticism was levelled directly at Dewey by his contemporaries, especially Morgenthau and Niebuhr, and it continues to inform neorealism. Inspired by Dewey’s response, the chapter argues Pragmatism is not blind to power or self-interest, it simply emphasizes, like contemporary IR constructivists, that understandings of the self (its identity and its interests) are not fixed; they are instead contingent on the self’s experience of interacting with its material and social environment. The normative implication for Pragmatists is that theorists should render that process intelligent by subjecting it to ‘conscientious reflection’. That process is a political one to the extent access to a community of inquiry is contingent on power. Part of the Pragmatist ‘vocation’ is a commitment to balancing political power by supporting Deweyan ‘publics’: those who are indirectly affected by practice but excluded from the relevant communities of practice. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the implication for key concepts in Realist and Pragmatist thought, including tragedy, prudence and learning.

The first twenty years of international negotiation on climate change took an approach that was guaranteed to fail: attempting to solve an immensely complex issue through a single, legally binding agreement. The history of diplomacy in trade and security shows that success requires a different approach: breaking a problem up into manageable parts, and growing agreement gradually, strengthening it as parties’ interests increasingly converge.

Chapter 15 begins with a general discussion of cultural adaptation the development of complex networks of conversation based on increasingly complex social organization, and the eventual fragmentation of discourse based on separate and often competing interests.The chapter discusses how the development of media first consolidated audiences then facilitated the fragmentation of audiences and the proliferation of incommensurable and conflicting narratives.The recent fragmentation of the US “national story,” centered around the Civil War and the issue of slavery, is used as a case study to illustrate the fragmentation of discourse and narratives, along with associated group and individual identities.The chapter closes with a brief discussion of the interaction of public discourse with politeness, facework, and homeostasis.

If the arguments of the preceding chapters are to be practically useful, it is necessary to move beyond claims about ‘personal bioinformation’ as a broad category, to locate how and why different bioinformation encounters may impact our identities in a variety of ways. It is also necessary to unpack further what attending to identity interests adds to the ethical and regulatory landscape. The chapter addresses each of these aims. It starts by reviewing the nature and strength of our identity-related interests – both in accessing personal bioinformation that supports the development and maintenance of inhabitable embodied self-narratives and in doing so in waysthat support this inhabitability. The discussion then explores the factors affecting when and why different information encounters engage or serve this fundamental interest. This entails examining why some kinds of bioinformation are experienced as having particular identity-significance at all and the factors shaping whether it then supports or undermines the inhabitability of our self-narratives. The chapter concludes by demonstrating that our narrative identity interests are neither coextensive nor reducible to the kinds of ethical concerns that currently dominate bioethical debates and information disclosure policies and the need to attend to identity impacts in their own right.

Chapter 8 concludes the book by proposing ways to improve decision-making in relation to sharing linked data for research. It considers improvements in a number of areas: the decision-making framework of interests, values, and rights; the decision-making criteria and conditions; the decision makers who are best placed to make each decision; and the decision-making process. The chapter sets out the interests, values and rights that should frame decisions in this sphere, not all of which are currently represented in decision-making frameworks. It provides a list of decision-making criteria and considerations that should be taken into consideration by the relevant decision makers. The chapter distinguishes between ethical decisions, which should be made by ethics committees and governance decisions, which should be made data custodians. Finally, the chapter makes recommendations for a decision-making process that will be efficient, transparent, accountable and collaborative. This process is designed to lead to better decisions and to ensure that both the decision-making process and the decisions themselves develop and sustain the social licence needed to support the important enterprise of research using linked data.

Chapter 8 concludes the book by proposing ways to improve decision-making in relation to sharing linked data for research. It considers improvements in a number of areas: the decision-making framework of interests, values, and rights; the decision-making criteria and conditions; the decision makers who are best placed to make each decision; and the decision-making process. The chapter sets out the interests, values and rights that should frame decisions in this sphere, not all of which are currently represented in decision-making frameworks. It provides a list of decision-making criteria and considerations that should be taken into consideration by the relevant decision makers. The chapter distinguishes between ethical decisions, which should be made by ethics committees and governance decisions, which should be made data custodians. Finally, the chapter makes recommendations for a decision-making process that will be efficient, transparent, accountable and collaborative. This process is designed to lead to better decisions and to ensure that both the decision-making process and the decisions themselves develop and sustain the social licence needed to support the important enterprise of research using linked data.

Having prudential interests is a matter of possessing features, such as the ability to feel pain and pleasure, by which an organism can be concerned about itself. Some organisms lack such features. Sponges have no welfare apparatus; they are unresponsive. A responsive organism may acquire things that are intrinsically good or bad for it. These determine its welfare level, whether over a brief interval of time or over a lifetime, which, in turn, determines whether something is overall good or bad for it. An event or state of affairs E is overall good (bad) for us just if, and to the extent that, the intrinsic value for us of the actual world, in which E occurs, is higher (lower) than that of the closest world in which E does not occur. If the intrinsic value for me of a world w equals my lifetime welfare level in w, then coming into existence, and coming to be responsive, was neither good nor bad for me. If we assume that the intrinsic value for me of a world in which I am unresponsive is 0, then it was good for me to come into existence and to become responsive.

In the future, advances in genetic modification techniques will make it possible for us to change ourselves dramatically. Should we apply these techniques to ourselves? Should we apply them to our children? In answering these questions, we are hampered by the fact that the interests of an organism are determined by its design, at least in part. Having interests is a matter of possessing features, such as the ability to feel pain and pleasure, by which an organism can be concerned about itself. So choosing our design based on our interests seems circular. Still, we can take it for granted that we will wish to change our welfare apparatus, and that of our children, only in peripheral ways, and give preference to options that make our lifetime welfare level higher than other options. Several sorts of enhancement would benefit us. For example, if we can avoid senescence, we should extend our life span.

Determination and redetermination are critical components of a unitization agreement. The negotiation and renegotiation of the share allocation system enable parties to update the agreement as new information or technology appears. Several accepted methods of redetermination have developed in the oil and gas context, but none currently exist for aquifers. Some examples do appear to approach direct and indirect methods of aquifer redetermination. Examples of direct methods would involve the proven availability of groundwater or available rights to storage within the aquifer. Examples of indirect methods include allocations determined by modeling of geologic conditions, pooled reductions in groundwater extraction, or refinements in a management plan that allocates extraction rates.

The American support for the Zionist movement and later Israel was based on three premises: religion, shared values, and history. Religious belief and the Old Testament were significant components of the identity of the first Americans, the Puritans, and their descendants. Taking their cue from their devotion to the Bible, its stories, and geography, the Americans became convinced that if God’s prophecies were to be fulfilled, then the Jews should return to their homeland, and the Americans should propagate the restoration of the Jewish homeland. The American belief in democracy, a civic expression of religious beliefs and self-determination, in which they believed in for the Jews, led the United States to a sense of commitment towards the restoration and permanent well-being of the Jews in their own homeland. History was another component in the American commitment to the Zionist movement and Israel, the sense that it was America’s duty to undo the injustices that the Jews suffered for thousands of years from Christians, most recently the Holocaust. Contrary to the American idealistic commitment to the Zionist cause and to Israel, the Zionists and Israel viewed their alliance with the Americans more pragmatically.

This chapter explores the paradoxical logics embedded in the Swedish policymaking elites’ rationale for exporting advanced conventional weapons to the so-called developing world. Using the South Africa JAS-39 Gripen fighter jet deal as a case study, the chapter demonstrates how the policymaking elite consciously pursues a dual strategy regarding the production and circulation of weapons – one that is driven both by the Swedish internationalist tradition of “doing good” and “being good” in the world, but also for instrumental purposes. Overall, the investigation illustrates how such processes have become embedded societal symbols of Swedish identity in the post-Cold War era – a phenomenon that serves to conflate the operations of a militarized state with the perceived ideals of Swedish mediation, honest brokership, and overall as a significant contributor to frameworks of promoting ethical and peaceful methods on a global stage. These paradoxes, it is argued, raise important questions about so-called “Swedish exceptionalism.”

This chapter makes the case for a comparative theory of immigration policy making. It begins with a literature review of existing scholarship on the role of interests, institutions, and ideas in the making of immigration policy. The chapter provides an overview of the book’s argument and its methodology. It then provides a detailed discussion of the four country cases with a specific focus on historical legacies and institutional arrangements.

An overview of values-balancing legal reasoning, including the source and scope of obligations, behavior and reasoning, and the normativity of legal and non-legal reasoning.

Reason of state discourses see a renewed preoccupation with the divide between public and private. Even as there is an increased understanding of the need to keep state secrets, there are likewise increasing attempts to peer into hearts and minds of rulers. At the centre of this tension is the counsellor, whose position between public and private remains in contention. It is the emerging language of ‘interests’ which shows this tension most clearly. The counsellor is to advise according to the interest of the state, and not his own private interest. The more public a counsellor can be, the more likely he is to give advice in line with this state interest. Three problems emerge from this model, however. First, how can the counsellor be both secretive and public? Second, how can a private individual abandon his personal interests? And, third, a recurring issue, what if the counsellor knows the state’s interests better than the monarch: should his counsel then become command? These are the issues which come to the fore in the mid-seventeenth century, born of tensions apparent in the reason of state tradition.