Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

Framework Convention on Climate Change

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion Jonathan Haidt Pantheon Books, 2012One has likely heard that, for the sake of decorum, religion and politics should never be topics of conversation with strangers. Even amongst friends or even when it is known that others hold opposing political or religious views, why is it that discussion of religion and politics leads to visceral-level acrimony and that one's views are right and the other's views are wrong? Professor Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia examines the psychological basis of our "righteous minds" without resorting to any of the pejorative labeling that is usually found in a book on politics and religion and eschews a purely comparative approach. Haidt proposes the intriguing hypothesis that our visceral reaction to competing ideologies is a subconscious, rather than leaned, reaction that evolved over human evolution to innate senses of suffering, fairness, cheating and disease, and that moral foundations facilitated intra-group cooperation which in turn conferred survival advantages over other groups. These psychological mechanisms are genetic in origin and not necessarily amenable to rational and voluntary control - this is in part the reason debating one's ideological opposite more often leads to frustration rather than understanding. Haidt also suggests that morality is based on six "psychological systems" or foundations (Moral Foundations Theory), similar to the hypothesized adaptive mental modules which evolved to solve specific problems of survival in the human ancestral environment.While decorum pleads for more civility, it would be better, as Haidt suggests, dragging the issue of partisan politics out into the open in order to understand it and work around our righteous minds. Haidt suggests a few methods by which the level of rhetoric in American politics can be reduced, such that the political parties can at least be cordial as they have been in the past and work together to solve truly pressing social problems.There are a number of fascinating points raised in the current book, but most intriguing is the one that morality, ideology and religion are products of group selection, as adaptations that increased individual cooperation and suppressed selfishness, thereby increasing individual loyalty to the group. That morality, political ideology and religion buttress group survival is probably highly intuitive. However, given the contemporary focus on the individual as the source of adaptations, to the exclusion of all else, to suggest that adaptations such as religion and political ideology arose to enhance survival of groups is heresy or, as Haidt recounts, "foolishness". While previous rejection of group selection itself was due in part to conceptual issues, one could also point out the prevailing individualist social sentiment, "selfish gene" mentality and unrelenting hostility against those who supported the view that group selection did indeed apply to humans and not just to insects. Haidt gives a lengthy and convincing defense of group selection, his main point being that humans can pursue self- interest at the same time they promote self-interest within a group setting - humans are "90 percent chimp, 10 percent bees". One can readily observe in the news and entertainment mediate that religion is a frequent target of derision, even within the scientific community - Haidt points to the strident contempt that the "New Atheists" hold for religion. They claim that religion is purely a by-product of an adaptive psychological trait and as a mere by-product religion serves no useful purpose. However, the religious "sense" has somehow managed to persist in the human psyche. One explanation by the New Atheists of how religion propagated itself is that it is a "parasite" or "virus" which latches onto a susceptible host and induces the host to "infect" others. As a "virus" or "parasite" that is merely interested in its own survival, religion causes people to perform behaviors that do not increase their own reproductive fitness and may even be detrimental to survival, but religion spreads nonetheless. …

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

/pdf/economics-of-natural-resources-and-the-environment-43k62iyyte.pdf

Economics of natural resources and the environment

The Concept Of Law

This article has a theoretical and a practical objective. The theoretical objective is to conceptualize responsible innovation as the adequate and timely inclusion of public values relevant to technological development. Technological innovations always occur in a specific institutional context, closely connected to stakeholder dynamics. Hence, an ideal approach to responsible innovation requires interdisciplinary research that incorporates: (i) the ethics of technology, to investigate the role of values in design; (ii) institutional theory, to understand the parts played by institutions in realizing values; and (iii) policy, planning and science, technology and society literature, to focus on stakeholder engagement. The practical objective is to explain how this approach can be operationalized. Since values emerge and evolve during the development and implementation of technologies, we take public debate to be the empirical source for extracting public values. Several salient questions need to be addresse...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23299460.2014.882072

Responsible innovation as an endorsement of public values: the need for interdisciplinary research

New technology brings great benefits, but it can also create new and significant risks. When evaluating those risks in policymaking, there is a tendency to focus on social acceptance. By solely focusing on social acceptance, we could, however, overlook important ethical aspects of technological risk, particularly when we evaluate technologies with transnational and intergenerational risks. I argue that good governance of risky technology requires analyzing both social acceptance and ethical acceptability. Conceptually, these two notions are mostly complementary. Social acceptance studies are not capable of sufficiently capturing all the morally relevant features of risky technologies; ethical analyses do not typically include stakeholders' opinions, and they therefore lack the relevant empirical input for a thorough ethical evaluation. Only when carried out in conjunction are these two types of analysis relevant to national and international governance of risky technology. I discuss the Rawlsian wide reflective equilibrium as a method for marrying social acceptance and ethical acceptability. Although the rationale of my argument is broadly applicable, I will examine the case of multinational nuclear waste repositories in particular. This example will show how ethical issues may be overlooked if we focus only on social acceptance, and will provide a test case for demonstrating how the wide reflective equilibrium can help to bridge the proverbial acceptance-acceptability gap.

https://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/risa.12734

Bridging the Gap between Social Acceptance and Ethical Acceptability.

The introduction of new energy technologies may lead to public resistance and contestation. It is often argued that this phenomenon is caused by an inadequate inclusion of relevant public values in the design of technology. In this paper we examine the applicability of the value sensitive design (VSD) approach. While VSD was primarily introduced for incorporating values in technological design, our focus in this paper is expanded towards the design of the institutions surrounding these technologies, as well as the design of stakeholder participation. One important methodological challenge of VSD is to identify the relevant values related to new technological developments. In this paper, we argue that the public debate can form a rich source from which to retrieve the values at stake. To demonstrate this, we have examined the arguments used in the public debate regarding the exploration and exploitation of shale gas in the Netherlands. We identified two important sets of the underlying values, namely substantive and procedural values. This paper concludes with two key findings. Firstly, contrary to what is often suggested in the literature, both proponents and opponents seem to endorse the same values. Secondly, contestation seems to arise in the precise operationalization of these values among the different stakeholders. In other words, contestation in the Dutch shale gas debate does not arise from inter-value conflict but rather from intra-value conflicts. This multi-interpretability should be incorporated in VSD processes.

/pdf/contested-technologies-and-design-for-values-the-case-of-3r2kiommnm.pdf

Contested Technologies and Design for Values: The Case of Shale Gas

https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid%3A8044b7ea-d5a9-4127-ab47-12d470f3673c/datastream/OBJ/download

Energy justice and controversies: Formal and informal assessment in energy projects

Projects that deal with unconventional ways to produce, store, or transport energy often give rise to resistance by local communities. The value-laden basis of such resistance is often ignored by decision makers. This chapter operationalizes the concept of Responsible Innovation by using and adapting the approach of value sensitive design. This approach holds that the variety of stakeholders’ values might be taken as a point of departure for the (re)design of a technological system in such a way that divergent values can be accommodated. The scope of value sensitive design can be extended beyond the technology, however. Values are also embedded in the institutional context and in the processes of interaction between stakeholders. Hence, the prevention of controversies over conflicting values may be pursued by redesigning the institutional context, and by taking the dynamics of stakeholder interaction explicitly into account.

Behnam Taebi

Papers

Responsible innovation as an endorsement of public values: the need for interdisciplinary research

Bridging the Gap between Social Acceptance and Ethical Acceptability.

Contested Technologies and Design for Values: The Case of Shale Gas

Energy justice and controversies: Formal and informal assessment in energy projects

Responsible Innovation in Energy Projects: Values in the Design of Technologies, Institutions and Stakeholder Interactions