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38669 results in Cambridge Textbooks

Page 1238 of 1934

  • 9 - Freshwater Resources

  • from Part II - Principles And Rules Establishing Standards
  • Philippe Sands, University College London, Jacqueline Peel, University of Melbourne
  • With Adriana Fabra, Universitat de Barcelona, Ruth MacKenzie, University of Westminster
  • Book:
    Principles of International Environmental Law
    Published online:
    07 August 2018
    Print publication:
    01 March 2018, pp 337-383

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    A well-developed body of international rules governing freshwater resources (including rivers, lakes, groundwaters and reservoirs) is set forth in bilateral, regional and global treaties, as well as in guidelines in non-binding instruments adopted by UNEP, OECD, UNECE and other international organisations, including those in the non-governmental sector, such as the ILA and the IDI. In 1997, under the auspices of the UN, and building on the work of the ILC, a global framework Convention on the Law of Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses (1997 UN Watercourses Convention) was adopted, elements of which are broadly recognised to reflect customary law. The treaty entered into force on 17 August 2014 and currently has thirty-six parties.

    These agreements have emerged for geographical and political reasons: nearly half of the world's river basins are shared by two or more countries, and, although they comprise only about 3 per cent of the volume of water on the planet, they provide the vast majority of the supply used in human activity. Nearly 90 per cent of the total freshwater on the planet is locked into ice caps or glaciers, in the atmosphere or soil, or is deep underground. Thus, the primary source of the planet's available supply of freshwater is in rivers, lakes and reservoirs (though with growing water stress, groundwater aquifers are also increasingly being exploited). Scientists have estimated that the average amount of global runoff (the amount of water that is available for human use after evaporation and infiltration takes place) is between 39,500 km3 and 42,700 km3 a year, of which only around 9,000 km3 is readily accessible to humans, with an additional 3,500 km3 stored in reservoirs. Rainfall varies widely. Heavy rainfall in the Amazon Basin and south and southeast Asia compares with lower rainfall in arid and semi-arid states, which receive only 2 per cent of the world's runoff. Currently, more than 40 per cent of the world's population lives in conditions of water scarcity, and, if current consumption patterns continue, the world is projected to face a global water deficit of 40 per cent by 2030.

  • Introduction

  • Immanuel Kant
  • Edited and translated by Allen Wood, Yale University, Connecticut, George di Giovanni, McGill University, Montréal
  • Book:
    Kant: <I>Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason</I>
    Published online:
    14 September 2019
    Print publication:
    22 February 2018, pp vii-xxx

  • Summary

    As the title, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, rightly suggests, Immanuel Kant's religious thought is strongly rationalistic. In this Kant belongs to an important current of eighteenth-century thought – but with a difference. Rationalistic religious thought of the period, in Germany as in Britain, typically proposed to base religious belief on metaphysical proofs of the existence of God. Kant himself propounded and defended such a demonstration of divine existence in The Only Possible Ground of Proof for a Demonstration of God's Existence (1763), a work of his earlier, “precritical” period. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), however, which inaugurated the “critical” period to which all the works collected in the present volume belong, Kant criticized traditional attempts at metaphysical demonstration of the existence of God, and argued that the nature and intrinsic limits of human thought and knowledge preclude any such demonstration. Such a critique might be expected to support atheism, but that was not Kant's intent. On the contrary, he argued that any metaphysical demonstration of the non-existence of God is equally precluded by the limits of reason. In a famous phrase, he declared that he “had to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith” (B XXX).

    The faith Kant has in mind is a purely rational faith, but it is grounded in practical (action-guiding, moral) reason rather than in theoretical reason. In Kant's view the inability of our theoretical faculties to prove the truth or falsity of religious claims leaves room for our practical reason to determine our religious stance. He welcomes this because he thinks it crucial for religion to be controlled by moral considerations.

    Both in the Critique of Pure Reason and more fully in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant argues that the needs of morality demand and justify a sort of faith in the existence of God; he gives related arguments for believing in human immortality and affirming the freedom of the human will. We will touch on Kant's views on free will below; the arguments for belief in God and immortality both turn on claims that morality demands that we set ourselves certain ends, and that we therefore need, morally, to believe in the possible attainment of those ends. One such end is the perfection of our own virtue.

  • 6 - Auctions

  • Donald E. Campbell, College of William and Mary, Virginia
  • Book:
    Incentives
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    22 February 2018, pp 357-422

  • Summary

    Auctions have been used for more than 2,500 years to allocate a single indivisible asset. They are also used to sell multiple units of some commodities, such as rare wine or a new crop of tulip bulbs. There are many different types of auctions in use, and far more that have never been tried but could be employed if we felt that they served some purpose. The aim of this chapter is to determine which type of auction should be used in a particular situation. Accordingly, we need to determine which bidder would get the asset that is up for sale and then howmuch would be paid for it.

    INTRODUCTION

    When the government sells things at auction – treasury bills, oil-drilling rights, or a TV broadcast frequency, for instance – the appropriate criterion for determining which type of auction should be used is the maximization of general consumer welfare. Because the bidders are usually firms, we recommend the auction type that would put the asset in the hands of the firm that would use it to produce the highest level of consumer welfare. Fortunately, this is correlated with the value of the asset to a bidder: the more valuable the asset is to consumers when it is used by firm X, themore profit X anticipates from owning the asset, and thus the higher the value that X itself places on the asset. (Section 6.1.2 explains why revenue net of cost is a good measure of the benefit that consumers derive from a firm's activities.) The discounted stream of profits that would flow from the asset is the individual firm's reservation value, and it is a hidden characteristic. If the government were to ask each firm to report its reservation value and awarded the asset to the high-value firm it would get nothing resembling truthful revelation. Each would have a strong incentive to overstate the value it places on the asset in an attempt to increase the probability of being awarded the asset.

  • Part One - Concerning the Indwelling of the Evil Principle alongside the Good or Of the Radical Evil in Human Nature

  • from The Philosophical Doctrine of Religion Part One
  • Immanuel Kant
  • Edited and translated by Allen Wood, Yale University, Connecticut, George di Giovanni, McGill University, Montréal
  • Book:
    Kant: <I>Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason</I>
    Published online:
    14 September 2019
    Print publication:
    22 February 2018, pp 53-88

  • Summary

    That “the world lieth in evil” is a complaint as old as history, even as old as the older art of poetry; indeed, just as old as the oldest poetry of all, the religion of the priests. All allow that the world began with something good: with the Golden Age, with life in Paradise, or an even happier life in communion with heavenly beings. But then they make this happiness disappear like a dream, and they spitefully hasten the decline into evil (moral evil, with which the physical always went hand in hand) in an accelerating fall, so that now (this “now” is, however, as old as history) we live in the final age; the Last Day and the destruction of the world are knocking at the door, and in certain regions of India the Judge and Destroyer of the world, Rutra (otherwise known as Shiva or Shiwa), already is worshipped as the God now holding power, after Vishnu, the Sustainer of the World, grown weary of the office he had received from Brahma the Creator, resigned it centuries ago.

    More recent, though far less widespread, is the opposite heroic opinion, which has gained standing only among philosophers and, in our days, especially among the pedagogues: that the world steadfastly (though hardly noticeably) forges ahead in the very opposite direction, namely from bad to better; that at least there is in the human being the predisposition to move in this direction. But surely, if the issue is moral good or evil (not just growth in civilization), they have not drawn this view from experience, for the history of all times attests far too powerfully against it; and we may presume that it is, rather, just an optimistic presupposition on the part of the moralists, from Seneca to Rousseau, intended to encourage the indefatigable cultivation of that seed of goodness that perhaps lies in us, if one could only count on any such natural foundation of goodness in the human kind. Yet this is also to be said: Since we must assume that the human being is sound of body by nature (i.e., in the way he is usually born), there is no cause not to assume that he is equally sound and good of soul by nature as well. Nature itself would then be promoting the cultivation in us of this ethical predisposition toward goodness.

  • 4 - Supply Chain Configuration and Connection

  • from Part II - Structural Dimension of Supply Chain Management
  • Bowon Kim
  • Book:
    Supply Chain Management
    Published online:
    21 June 2018
    Print publication:
    22 February 2018, pp 123-157

  • Summary

    In Chapter 3, we defined supply chain management and its key dimensions. In this chapter, we discuss the first two elements of the structural dimension, i.e., configuration and connection. Configuration is about what, where, and how much, whereas connection is about how to relate diverse supply chain activities scattered across the supply chain. Throughout the book, we regard the chief executive officer (CEO) as the key decision-maker (DM) in an organization. As such, we use the two terms, CEO and DM, interchangeably. The key decision-maker at a company is expected to make decisions that enable the company to perform exceptionally in managing the supply chain. Configuration and connection are part of such critical decisions.

    Key Learning Points

  • • Decision hierarchy shows how corporate strategy is implemented through business strategy and its associated planning steps. In turn, every element or step in the decision hierarchy is affected by various forms of uncertainty.

  • • The goal of supply chain management is to improve the performance of the supply chain, i.e., to maximize both efficiency-driven and responsiveness-driven values at the same time.

  • • Customer feels satisfied when she believes that she is receiving a distinctive “value” from the product and service provided by the company.

  • • The first decision element in the structural dimension of supply chain designing is configuration, which calls for several key questions to answer, e.g., what (product or service), where (location), and how much (capacity).

  • • Once configuration of the supply chain is decided, the decision-maker should define an informational relationship among the supply chain functions, i.e., how to connect or link the supply chain activities, which are physically or geographically scattered according to the configuration decision, in order to achieve the goal most effectively.

    • Wisdom Box 4.1

    Wisdom and Insights

    Designing a Supply Chain

    ReignCom (now known as iriver; www.iriver.com) was a rapidly growing Korean company that sold MP3 players. In 2003, it enjoyed a 52 percent market share in Korea and almost 25 percent worldwide. In order to make and sell an MP3 player, there were several steps involved, such as developing a new product concept, designing, fabricating, and distributing (Figure 4.1). First, ReignCom developed a concept for its new MP3 player model, but didn't do the entire designing. Instead, it outsourced the “outer design” to an industrial design company, INNO Design in Silicon Valley, California.

  • On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials a in Theodicy

  • from On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy
  • Immanuel Kant
  • Edited and translated by Allen Wood, Yale University, Connecticut, George di Giovanni, McGill University, Montréal
  • Book:
    Kant: <I>Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason</I>
    Published online:
    14 September 2019
    Print publication:
    22 February 2018, pp 19-36

  • Summary

    By “theodicy” we understand the defense of the highest wisdom of the creator against the charge which reason brings against it for whatever is counterpurposive in the world. – We call this “the defending of God's cause,” even though the cause might be at bottom no more than that of our presumptuous reason failing to recognize its limitations. This is indeed not the best of causes, yet one that can be condoned insofar as (aside from that self-conceit) the human being is justified, as rational, in testing all claims, all doctrines which impose respect upon him, before he submits himself to them, so that this respect may be sincere and not feigned.

    Now for this vindication it is required that the would-be advocate of God prove either that whatever in the world we judge counterpurposive is not so; or, if there is any such thing, that it must be judged not at all as an intended effect but as the unavoidable consequence of the nature of things; or, finally, that it must at least be considered not as an intended effect of the creator of all things but, rather, merely of those beings in the world to whom something can be imputed, i.e. of human beings (higher spiritual beings as well, good or evil, as the case may be).

    The author of a theodicy agrees, therefore, that this juridical process be instituted before the tribunal of reason; he further consents to represent the accused side as advocate through the formal refutation of all the plaintiff's complaints; he is not therefore allowed to dismiss the latter in the course of the process of law through a decree of incompetency of the tribunal of human reason (exceptio fori), i.e. he cannot dismiss the complaints with a concession of the supreme wisdom of the author of the world, imposed upon the plaintiff, which would immediately explain away as groundless, even without examination, all doubts that might be raised against it; he must rather attend to the objections, and clarify and remove them so as to make comprehensible how they in no way derogate from the concept of the highest wisdom.

  • 8 - Public Goods and Preference Revelation

  • Donald E. Campbell, College of William and Mary, Virginia
  • Book:
    Incentives
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    22 February 2018, pp 459-503

  • Summary

    This chapter investigates preference revelation in a standard economicmodel. There is a commodity that can be consumed jointly and simultaneously by the entire community – a fireworks display, for instance. To produce this public good, resources have to be diverted from the production of commodities for private consumption. In ourmodel, as in the real world, efficiency requires a positive amount of some public good to be produced. But there is a point beyond which an increase in the supply of the public good leads to an inefficient outcome. Clearly, identification of an efficient outcome depends on individuals revealing their preferences. In this context truthful revelation of individual preference is problematic because one can consume the public good without contributing to the financing of it.

    More generally, agent A's action generates a positive spillover if some other agent B directly benefits as a result of that action. For example, if A removes weeds from his own property, then neighbor B's grass will have fewer weeds because one source of seed has been eliminated. In this case, most of the benefit of A's effort is reaped by A, so we say that the spillover is incomplete. However, if C produces a fireworks display then everyone else in town will have just as good a view of it as C and hence the spillover is complete. When the agent creating the spillover benefit is not compensated for the positive effect on the welfare of others, we refer to it as an externality. Important examples include the containment of a virulent disease by a health organization, the retardation of global warming or ozone depletion by international treaty, and publication of information concerning public safety.

    Our aim is to provide the individual decision maker with incentive to consider the benefit that others derive from his or her actions. The decision maker can be a single individual or household, or a region within a country, or even a country itself. When one country takes costly measures to reduce its output of carbon dioxide any resulting retardation of global warming is a benefit that is captured by every country.

Page 1238 of 1934