The prospect of climate engineering (CE) – also known as geoengineering, referring to modification of the global environment to partly offset climate change and impacts from elevated atmospheric greenhouse gases – poses major, disruptive challenges to international policy and governance. If full global cooperation to manage climate change is not initially achievable, adding CE to the agenda has major effects on the challenges and risks associated with alternative configurations of participation – for example, variants of partial cooperation, unilateral action, and exclusion. Although the risks of unilateral CE by small states or non-state actors have been over-stated, some powerful states may be able to pursue CE unilaterally, risking international destabilization and conflict. These risks are not limited to future CE deployment, but may also be triggered by unilateral research and development (R&D), secrecy about intentions and capabilities, or assertion of legal rights of unilateral action. They may be reduced by early cooperative steps, such as international collaboration in R&D and open sharing of information. CE presents novel opportunities for explicit bargaining linkages within a complete climate response. Four CE-mitigation linkage scenarios suggest how CE may enhance mitigation incentives, and not weaken them as commonly assumed. Such synergy appears to be challenging if CE is treated only as a contingent response to a future climate crisis, but may be more achievable if CE is used earlier and at lower intensity, either to reduce peak near-term climate disruption in parallel with a programme of deep emission cuts or to target regional climate processes linked to acute global risks.

This article examines the decisive role of the pneumonic plague epidemic of 1904 in re-shaping the racial geography of Johannesburg after the South African War. The panic which this epidemic evoked swept away the obstacles which had blocked such a step since 1901 and saw the Indian and African inhabitants of the inner-city Coolie Location forcibly removed to Klipspruit Farm 12 miles outside of the city as a health emergency measure. There, the latter were compelled to remain, even after the epidemic had waned, making it henceforth the officially designated site for their residence. In 1963, now greatly expanded, it was named Soweto. From small germs do mighty townships grow.

This paper investigates the derivational relationship between adjectives and verbs in Mandarin Chinese describing related state, change of state (COS) and caused COS meanings. Such paradigms have been observed in various languages to fall into two categories: One in which a word naming a property concept state constitutes the derivational base for the related COS verbs, and another in which a COS verb forms the basis from which the stative word – a ‘result state’ predicate – is derived. I show that in Mandarin, the distinction between morphological paradigms based on property-concept words versus eventive verbs is also found, but the actual derivational relations between verbs and adjectives are influenced by language-particular morphological properties of Mandarin. Specifically, I argue that a gradable property concept adjective systematically alternates to a related COS verb. This alternation, which can be tapped by degree modification and negation contexts, distinguishes adjectives from stative verbs, which do not have consistent COS counterparts, and from underived intransitive COS verbs, which do not have systematic stative counterparts. That is, I show that COS verbs do not lend themselves to the systematic derivation of result state adjectives. Rather, I argue that result state adjectives in Mandarin arise from conceptual-pragmatic factors: The nominal modified by such a result state adjective should be understood as describing a culturally or contextually salient class of entities.

This paper examines the increasingly popular view that new insights from the science of subjective well-being (SSWB) should play a prominent role in the determination of public policy. Though there are instrumental reasons for caring about societal happiness too, these political aspirations of the SSWB appear to be mostly intrinsically motivated. As the intrinsic value of happiness is endorsed across the political–philosophical spectrum, there is some initial plausibility to the expectation that it should not be too difficult to develop intrinsically motivated policies that can count on widespread support. This paper argues, however, that intrinsically motivated policies based on SSWB findings will always be highly controversial. This is because, although happiness is widely held to be intrinsically valuable, it is usually not deemed unconditionally valuable. By exploring the policy implications of three different views of this conditionality – happiness as a fitting response to the state of the world, authenticity, and merit – it is shown that different views of the conditionality of the intrinsic value of happiness have widely diverging policy implications, which greatly undermines the political aspirations of the SSWB.

John Rawls argues that it is possible to describe a suitably defined initial situation from which to form reliable judgements about justice. In this initial situation, rational persons are deprived of information that is ‘irrelevant from the standpoint of justice’. It is rational, Rawls argues, for persons choosing principles of justice from this standpoint to be guided by the maximin rule. Critics, however, argue that (i) the maximin rule is not the appropriate decision rule for Rawls's choice position; (ii) the maximin argument relies upon an imprecise account of the satisfactory minimum to be secured under the maximin rule; or that (iii) Rawls relies upon unrealistic assumptions about diminishing marginal value. These critics, I will suggest, argue from a number of assumptions that are confused or false. The satisfactory minimum that choosers in the original position – employing the maximin rule – seek to achieve is not a minimum level of primary goods, nor is the satisfactory minimum sought under the maximin rule supplied by the difference principle. I will argue that the maximin argument is more robust than has generally been recognized and that this argument performs a number of important functions in clarifying the nature and implications of Rawls's argument for justice as fairness.

In traditional decision theory, utility is regarded as a mathematical representation of preferences to be inferred from agents’ choices. In the recent literature at the interface between economics, psychology and neuroscience, several authors argue that economists could develop more predictive and explanatory models by incorporating insights concerning individuals’ hedonic experiences. Some go as far as to contend that utility is literally computed by specific neural areas and urge economists to complement or substitute their notion of utility with some neuro-psychological construct. In this paper, I distinguish three notions of utility that are frequently mentioned in debates about decision theory and examine some critical issues regarding their definition and measurability. Moreover, I provide various empirical and conceptual reasons to doubt that economists should base decision theoretic analyses on some neuro-psychological notion of utility.

This article illustrates how axiomatic social choice theory can be used in the evaluation of measures of group fitness for a biological hierarchy, thereby contributing to the dialogue between the philosophy of biology and social choice theory. It provides an axiomatic characterization of the ordering underlying the Michod–Viossat–Solari–Hurand–Nedelcu index of group fitness for a multicellular organism. The MVSHN index has been used to analyse the germ-soma specialization and the fitness decoupling between the cell and organism levels that takes place during the evolutionary transition to multicellularity. It is argued that some of the axioms satisfied by the MVSHN group fitness ordering are not appropriate for all stages in this transition.

How to rank distributions of benefits and harms? In this book, Larry Temkin addresses this question in detail. Its core claims are two. First, the goodness of a distribution is sometimes ‘essentially comparative’ – it sometimes depends on which alternative distribution(s) it is compared to. Second, there are many cases in which our intuitions are at odds with the transitivity of ‘all things considered better than’ and these cases give us reason to doubt that this relation is transitive. (Transitivity holds that if some alternative a3 is better than a2, and a2 is better than a1, then a3 is better than a1.)