Showing papers on "Agency (philosophy) published in 1994"

The narrative constitution of identity: A relational and network approach

Abstract: justice. Women, by contrast, were believed to be at a lower stage because they were found to have a sense of agency still tied primarily to their social relationships and to make political and moral decisions based on context-specific principles based on these relationships rather than on the grounds of their own autonomous judgments. Students of gender studies know well just how busy social scientists have been kept by their efforts to come up with ever more sociological "alibis" for the question of why women did not act like men. Gilligan's response was to refuse the terms of the debate altogether. She thus did not develop yet another explanation for why women are "deviant." Instead, she turned the question on its head by asking what was wrong with the theory a theory whose central premises defines 50% of social beings as "abnormal." Gilligan translated this question into research by subjecting the abstraction of universal and discrete agency to comparative research into female behavior evaluated on its own terms The new research revealed women to be more "concrete" in their thinking and more attuned to "fairness" while men acted on "abstract reasoning" and "rules of justice." These research findings transformed female otherness into variation and difference but difference now freed from the normative de-

Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency

Abstract: Network analysis is one of the most promising currents in sociological research, and yet it has never been subjected to a theoretically informed assessment and critique. This article outlines the theoretical presuppositions of network analysis. It also distinguishes between three different (implicit) models in the network literature of the interrelations of social structure, culture, and human agency. It concludes that only a strategy for historical explanation that synthesizes social structural and cultural analysis can adequately explain the formation, reproduction, and transformation of networks themselves. The article sketches the broad contours of such a theoretical synthesis in the conclusion.

The Discursive Mind

Abstract: A Clash of Paradigms The Second Cognitive Revolution Thought Cognitive Psychology of the First Kind Cognitive Modelling Discourse and the Brain The Discursive Origins of the Sense of Self Agency and Personality Emotion Words and Emotional Acts Perception and Consciousness

Dislocating Masculinity : Comparative Ethnographies

Abstract: This book draws upon anthropology, feminism and postmodernism to offer a penetrating and challenging study of how gender operates. The book offers a radical critique of much of the recent writing on and by men and raises important questions about emodiment, agency and the variety of masculine styles.

Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason

Abstract: 1. Why the Phenomenology of Spirit? 2. The claims to self-sufficient knowledge: sense-certainty, perception, understanding 3. The claims of self-sufficient agency: freedom and self-consciousness 4. Modern life's project of self-justification 5. Modern life's alternatives and modern life's possibilities 6. The self-reflection of the human community 7. The essential structure of modern life.

From Grammar to Politics: Linguistic Anthropology in a Western Samoan Village

Abstract: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1 Introduction The Place of Grammar The Political and Moral Dimensions of Grammatical Choices Getting to the "Facts" Intertextuality and Heteroglossia Representations of the Social Order Change Talk and Conflict: The Relevance of Genre Distinctions What Kind of Pragmatics Is This? A Speech Event Approach 2 Methods as Forms of Life Field Linguistics Ethnographic Linguistics In Search of a Method The NSF Project Research Agendas and Acquired Social Identities Interviews, Metalinguistic Awareness, and Native Taxonomies Discovering the Fono Interpreting the Texts The Fa)alupega or Ceremonial Address of Falefa What's in a Transcript? Writing Interaction 3 Hierarchies in the Making: Space, Time, and Speaking in a Fono A Love for Order and Its Permutations Space Temporal Boundaries Speaking Conclusions 4 Politics and Verbal Art: Heteroglossia in the Fono Variations across Contexts The Lauga Plan The Lauga as an Epic Genre Formalized Language and Power Variations within the Fono Conclusions 5 The Grammar of Agency in Political Discourse The Content of Political Speechmaking Grammatical Structures as Framing Devices The Expression of Agency in Samoan Grammar Ergative Agents in Fono Discourse: Claims of Accountability Human Agents in the Fono Discussion Mitigated Agency Agency and Power Conclusions 6 From Political Arenas to Everyday Settings: The Grammar of Agency across Contexts The Expression of Agency across Social Situations In Search of Fully Expressed Agents The Politics of Everyday Interaction I: Blaming The Politics of Everyday Interaction II: Giving Credit Illocutionary Force of Transitive Clauses with Agents Conclusions 7 Conclusions Ethnographic Linguistics Conflict and Grammar The Grammar of Human Agency: From Information Flow to Moral Flow Narrative Accounts Samoan Politics APPENDIX: ABBREVIATIONS IN INTERLINEAR GLOSSES NOTES REFERENCES INDEX

Rethinking Social Development: Theory, Research and Practice

Abstract: List of tables. List of figures. Preface. Introduction. 1. Rethinking social development: an overview. Part I Rebuilding the framework - models of explanation and strategies of enquiry: 2. Reconsidering the explanadum and scope of development studies - toward a comparative sociology of state-economy relations. 3. Heterogeneity, actor and structure - towards a reconstitution of the concept of structure. 4. Post-Marxism, post-colonialism - the needs and rights of distant strangers. Part II Reconnecting theory and research - new perspectives on the struggle for development: 5. The state in late development - historical and comparative perspectives. 6. The social construction of rural development - discourses, practices and power. 7. Between econonism and post-modernism - reflections on research on "agrarian change" in India. Part III Linking theory, research and practice - the issue of relevance: 8. Theory and relevance in indigenous agriculture - knowledge agency and organisation. 9. On ignoring the wider picture - AIDS research and the jobbing social scientist. 10. Social development research and the third sector - NGO's as uses and subjects of social inquiry. Afterword. 11. Rethinking social development - the search for relevance. 12. How far beyond the impasse? A provisional summing-up. Notes on contributors. Index.

Modern Sociological Theory

Abstract: General Theory in Sociology Agency Meaning and Motives in Social Arrangements Rationality The Maximization of Individual Interest Structure Secret Patterns which Determine Experience System An Overarching Order Culture and Ideology Power and the State Gender and Feminism Differentiation and Stratification Conclusion The Past and the Future of Sociological Theory

Telling Tales Out of School: Modernist, Critical, and Postmodern “True Stories” about Educational Computing:

Abstract: This article presents an analysis of the discourses of educational computing in terms of modernist, critical, and postmodernist narratives which attempt to tell “true stories” of how and why new technologies are to be harnessed in the service of educational ends, and about the prospects and pitfalls therein. The authors argue that it is principally the interpretive constraints imposed by these stories, and only secondarily the material capacities and constraints of the technology itself, which differently construct possibilities for pedagogic relations amongst students, teachers, and educational technologies. The authors conclude with an argument for (a) an “ethics of narration” in the weaving of tales with the focus squarely on the possibilities for agency and equity as these are enabled and constrained within particular emplotments and (b) seeking out typically untold and suppressed accounts in determining which tales told about educational computing are most likely to produce and to enable liberatory o...

Slacking Off: Border Youth and Postmodern Education

Abstract: For many theorists occupying various positions on the political spectrum, the current historical moment signals less a need to come to grips with the new forms of knowledge, experiences, and conditions that constitute postmodernism than the necessity to write its obituary. The signs of exhaus tion are in part measured by the fact that postmodernism has gripped two generations of intellectuals who have pondered endlessly over its meaning and implications as a "social condition and cultural movement" (Jencks 10). The "postmodern debate" has spurned little consensus and a great deal of confusion and animosity. The themes are, by now, well known: master narratives and traditions of knowledge grounded in first principles are spurned; philosophical principles of canonicity and the notion of the sacred have become suspect; epistemic certainty and the fixed boundaries of aca demic knowledge have been challenged by a "war on totality" and a disavowal of all-encompassing, single, world-views; rigid distinctions between high and low culture have been rejected by the insistence that the products of the so called mass culture, popular, and folk art forms are proper objects of study; the Enlightenment correspondence between history and progress and the modernist faith in rationality, science, and freedom have incurred a deep rooted skepticism; the fixed and unified identity of the humanist subject has been replaced by a call for narrative space that is pluralized and fluid; and, finally, though far from complete, history is spurned as a unilinear process that moves the West progressively toward a final realization of freedom.1 While these and other issues have become central to the postmodern debate, they are connected through the challenges and provocations they provide to modernity's conception of history, agency, representation, cul ture, and the responsibility of intellectuals. The postmodern challenge constitutes not only a diverse body of cultural criticism, it must also be seen

Globalising Civil Society: Interpreting International NGOs in Central America

Abstract: The globalization of capital in the years since the Second World War represents a profound challenge to the dominant world order. The implications of globalization for production relations and the role of the state are subjects of considerable debate. The theoretical tools for understanding the impact of globalization on the structure of world order and the relationship between the individual, groups and the world system is, however, still underdeveloped. Recently emerging literature on a ‘global civil society’ represents one way of conceptualizing current transformations of world order. Most importantly, however, this approach permits the reinsertion of questions of agency and democracy into the study of international political economy which, at times, is overwhelmed by the seemingly implacable forces of capitalist economic expansion and the consequent bypassing of the authority of the nation state, the primary focus of most democratic political action in the modern world.

Two stories about structure and agency

Abstract: So stark and swift was the collapse of the Cold War structure of international relations that few yet pretend to have been expecting it. The magnitude of the changes involved has forced practitioners and theorists alike into radical rethinking. For practitioners, the old certainties have gone and it is unclear what political and security structures will replace those of the Cold War: whether it will be a New World Order or a New World Disorder is still very much open to debate. But for international relations theorists the events have focused attention on the nature of international political structures. What kind of structures can international systems represent if they can be changed so fundamentally and so easily? Neo-realists especially have to rethink a dominant discourse which relies heavily on established regularities and on the stability of the bipolar system. What does it say for Waltz's conception of international structure if it can be so easily transcended by unit factors? If structural theories of international relations can say nothing about an event as momentous as the collapse of the Cold War system, what can they say anything about? Neo-realists could ignore the fact that their theories could not account for transformations of international structure precisely because these theories did explain the regularity and stability of bipolarity. Now that is gone, theorists have to look again at what they mean by a structure. Moreover, the nature of agency has to be reexamined; for neo-realists human agency was essentially irrelevant at the structural level of explanation, yet the collapse of the Cold War system seemed to depend very largely on active and calculating agents. Questions concerning the nature of agency and the meaning of structure and the relationship between them are now more relevant than ever in international relations theory.

Reframing and grounding nonhuman agency: what makes a fetus an agent?

Abstract: Agency: The power of actors to operate independently of the determining constraints of social structure. The term is intended to convey the volitional, purposive nature of human activity as opposed to its constrained, determined aspects.—Harper Collins Dictionary of Sociology, 1991The concept that the fetus is a patient, an individual whose maladies are a proper subject for medical treatment as well as scientific observation, is alarmingly modern. It was not until the last half of this century that the prying eye of the ultrasonographer rendered the once opaque womb transparent, letting the light of scientific observation fall on the shy and secretive fetus.—M. R. Harrison“The Fetus as a Patient: Historical Perspective”

Power and Social Movements in the Other Occident: Latin America in an International Context

Abstract: Across a broad range of social and political enquiry, the analysis and conceptual location of social movements continue to evoke controversy and engender new spheres of reflection. In exploring the emergence of social movements and especially what have come to be termed "new social movements" as a significant presence in much contemporary debate, three main factors can be mentioned. In the first place, there has been continuing growth of interest in questions of agency and subjectivity. In the wake of a surfacing disillusionment with the traditional anchorage of class analysis, the issue of the constitution of social subjects and their potential relation to collective action and political change has become increasingly pivotal. In this analytical context, the study of movements provides a potential point of convergence and condensation for many of the theoretical and political arguments that traverse this wider territory. Second, the controversies surrounding the potential political relevance of social movements, especially in connection with the differential meanings of democracy, have tended to flow into and reinforce the importance of discussions of the state-society nexus. Finally, in an era sometimes characterized in terms of a posited "end of history" and one in which the percepts of neoliberalism and possessive individualism have gained greater currency-Connolly (1991: 172), for example, refers to the "universalization of the drive to affluence"-the widespread occurrence of movements of protest has engendered a sense of hope. Social movements have, however tenuously or indeterminately, held open the possibility of another horizon; optimism of the will, in a time of disenchantment, has been given a new dynamic.

Akrasia and Agency in Plato’s Laws and Republic

Abstract: Philosophers from Plato to Davidson have long found akratic action puzzling. One well-known sign of Plato's puzzlement is that although he rejects the possibility of akratic action in the Protagoras, he reworks his moral psychology in the Republic to accommodate its possibility. But what has not been noticed is that the Republic is not the final resolution of Plato's puzzlement. In the Laws, Plato returns to the problem of akratic action. As in the Republic, Plato accepts its possibility, but in the Laws he offers a new analysis of what goes on inside an agent who acts akratically. As the shift in Plato's position from the Protagoras to the Republic required a revision in Plato's moral psychology, so the new analysis of akratic action in the Laws requires an important revision in the moral psychology of the Republic. The Republic's explanation of the nature of the conflict present in the agent who acts akratically makes essential reference to different parts of the soul which are themselves agent-like. The Laws explains akratic action without invoking agent-like parts of the soul, and the agent-like parts of the soul of the Republic are absent from the moral psychology of the Laws.

The Ethical Primate: Humans, Freedom and Morality

Abstract: Part I - Introductory 1. Inner Divisions 2. Misguided Debates Part II - The Reductive Enterprise 3. Guiding Visions 4. Hopes of Simplicity 5. Crusades, Legitimate and Otherwise 6. Convergent Explanations and their Uses 7. Troubles of the Linear Pattern 8. Fatalism and Predictability Part III - The Sources and Meaning of Morals 9. Agency and Ethics 10. Modern Myths 11. The Strength of Individualism 12. The Retreat from the Natural World 13. How Far does Sociability Take Us? 14. The Uses of Sympathy Part IV - What Kind of Freedom? 15. On Being Terrestrial 16. What Beings are Free 17. Minds Resist Streamlining

So you did what you wanted then : discourse analysis, personal agency, and psychotherapy

Abstract: This paper explores issues concerning personal agency in discursive psychology and discourse analysis, with a particular emphasis on agency in terms of motivational accounts of the person. Issues are discussed in relation to the efficacy, acceptability, and accessibility of discourse analytic research for the practising psychotherapist. We suggest that such an approach may raise problems in four areas. First, we argue that without explicit theorization of the subject as language user, discourse analysis may be vulnerable to the charge of determinism. Second, theorization of the subject as language user may be required to account successfully for individual consistency and continuity of identity. Third, although claiming to critique commonsense notions of subjectivity, implicit dualist assumptions facilitate a reading of discursive psychology that is compatible with a motivational model of the person. Finally, we argue that discursive psychology itself implies a particular model of the strategically motivated language user. We conclude that, although these issues require clarification, discursive psychology and discourse analysis have much to offer psychotherapy research.

After Representation: Science Studies in the Performative Idiom

Abstract: Studies of science are usually addressed in a representational idiom which takes it for granted that the defining characteristic of science is its production of representations of nature. Here I advocate the move to a performative idiom which thematises the agency of machines and human beings. This move leads to a temporally emergent and posthumanist analysis of scientific culture and practice, and promises an antidisciplinary synthesis of the science-studies disciplines, spanning an impure sociology of science, a displacement of the traditional philosophical problematics of realism and incommensurability, and a historiography of science centered on performative intertwinings of science, technology and society.

Structure, Agency and Social Transformation

Abstract: Revisiting the structure/agency debate, the article puts forward the broad position shared by Giddens’structuration theory and Bhaskar's transformational model. It defends Giddens’concept of structure as‘rules and resources’against charges of idealism, arguing that its strength is its focus on the interface of structure and agency. But both Giddens and Bhaskar emphasise social reproduction as an unintended consequence of social action. Taking issue with postmodern pessimism, the article goes on to consider the conditions of possibility, and requisite forms of knowledgeability, for deliberate social transformation.

Discourses of Agency and Domestic Labor: Family Discourse and Gendered Practice in Dual-Earner Families

Abstract: This article uses the concept of family discourse to investigate the systematic structuring of social relations surrounding parents' gendered—often unequal—family responsibilities and practices. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with parents of young children in dual-earner families, the article presents two ways of analyzing parents' accounts of reasons for their division of labor. First, it focuses on how parents use talk to construct rationalizations, myths, and coping mechanisms. Second, it moves beyond an interpretive approach to examine the discursive constitution of parents' talk, identifying four common discourses that run throughout parents' talk of domestic labor: personal preference; abilities of women versus men; roles and socialization; and natural bonding of mother and child. The author maintains that these not only give material for rationalizations but that by structuring perceptions, they enable parents to ascribe meaning to their action and construct new action from this meaning. ...

Women's agency and collective action

Abstract: A core aspect of politics is that women are acted upon in various ways—as women, but denied the right to re-act—as women. A series of rules and norms constrain women from translating their individual experiences of subordination into collective action. Yet, women do resort to action, which, however, may result in more or less change. In focusing on what women can do rather than on what is done to us, feminist political theory and practice might come closer to an understanding of the political implications of patriarchy.

The Making of the Child Support Act of 1991: Policy Making at the Intersection of Law and Social Policy

Abstract: The legislative process has not traditionally been a central concern of sociolegal scholars, but has remained within the territory of political science. This paper argues that sociologists of law have an important contribution to make to developing the sociology of the legislative process, and that an understanding of legal processes and ways of thinking could enrich the study of public policy from the development of a new policy idea, through the strategy for preparation and, finally, the parliamentary management of a new statute. The child support legislation of 1991 is taken as a example of this process, and is of particular interest because it lies at the intersection of legal and social policy concerns. The Child Support Act removed responsibility for the assessment and enforcement of financial support for children by absent parents from its traditional place within the court system and placed it in an administrative agency closely linked to the Department of Social Security. The laudable aim of strengthening parental responsibility has gone almost unmentioned, and the new system has been widely criticized in the press, leading to protest marches being banned in central London, and even accusations of its contributing to acts of suicide. This paper addresses the question of how the legislation developed, and how some of the differences between legal and social welfare approaches contributed to subsequent criticism of a scheme widely accepted in broad principle but often unacceptable in individual cases. In 1990 divorce, alimony, property settlements, and support for children in the United Kingdom were the province of solicitors, barristers, and judges with perhaps occasional advice from accountants. By the time of writing, four years later, the Lord Chancellor's Department has published a Green Paper, entitled Looking to the Future,1 which takes forward the Law Commission's proposals2 to move to divorce on application over a period of time, to sever the link between lawyers and divorce, and to offer advice and information to couples approaching divorce with the aim of enabling them to manage their own affairs. In cases where a dispute arises about financial

Reply to Commentators

Abstract: Sources of the Self attempts to trace the development of what I call the "modern identity," by which I mean a set of understandings of what it is to be a human agent which are current in modem western civilization. After an initial section in which I try to trace some of the connections between identity, society and the good, I develop a portrait of the modern identity in three main headings: tracing the development of the different forms of modern inwardness, the rise of the ethic which affirms ordinary life and puts great emphasis on equality and benevolence, and the articulating of the expressivist understanding of agency with its attendant emphasis on the creative imagination. The book finishes with a short discussion of the contemporary predicament, which mainly attempts to put the questions which arise for future work. Reading the papers of MacIntyre and Olafson was a humbling experience, and this for two reasons. First, I am made aware of how badly I communicated some of my basic points. I have to admit this came as a surprise. Secondly, a weakness I was aware of came very much to the fore. The book, particularly towards the end, contains affirmations or hints of affirmations which go beyond what I made any systematic attempt to argue for. I thought and still think this is a good procedure, because it sometimes helps the reader to understand what you've said, if you're a little more forthcoming on where you'd like to end up. But of course, readers, particularly philosophical readers, find it difficult to treat these hints differently from the central thesis I've been arguing. I'd like to start with Alasdair MacIntyre's very interesting paper, which I also found very challenging. I found his summary of the book very fair. But there are some cross-purposes in the differences between us as he lays it out. MacIntyre takes me to be committed to the view that, in making choices between goods, "we express no more than our personal preferences" (pp. 18889). I think he sees me as so committed, because of something I do say, which he quotes earlier (p. 187), viz., that goods may be in conflict without refuting each other. Now what I was trying to deny here is not that goods which are now in conflict can be integrated into a single life, perhaps by being put in the con-

Exports and imports: anaphora in attitudinal ascriptions

Abstract: Propositional attitudes are at the interface of several philosophical concerns with thinking, language, and reality. Some philosophers approach them with an interest in semantics, others with a concern about contents, inquiring into the proper objects of cognitive states. For yet others, the attitudes are critical elements of a correct account of agency, since agents seem responsibe only for actions which are caused by the appropriate sort of attitudes, e.g., intentions or some complex of beliefs and desires. Here, discriminations among various sorts of content are needed to single out the relevant causal mechanisms. Finally, some approach the attitudes from an interest in mind/body metaphysics, occupied with what must exist in order for attitude ascriptions to be true if, indeed, such talk is coherent at all. A good deal of concern revolves about reference and attributions of reference, stimulated by familiar problems of substituting apparently coreferential singular terms in attitude ascriptions. To illustrate; I recall my friend Robert's astonishment upon learning that the local priest, who lived in the parish house in our town, was also the venerated fire chief whom we had all seen in action. Prior to this discovery, one might have correctly reported one of Robert's beliefs with,

Backstreets, barricades, and blackouts: urban terrains of resistance in Nepal

Abstract: In this paper I apply aspects of sociospatial theory to the revolutionary context of urban Nepal during the democratic uprisings of 1990. The urban spaces of Kathmandu and Patan were two of the most important sites within which power was contested, and terrains upon which space itself was contested. As I will show, the location of struggle emerged from con­ scious movement choices (as to tactics, efficacy of mobilization, etc) and influenced the character of collective action. An analysis of the spatial mediation of social movement agency provides us with what 1 term the 'terrain of resistance*—t he specific geographical, historical, political, eco­ nomic, ecological, and cultural context of movement agency. Such analysis can provide us with important insights into why movements occur where they do, the spatiocultural specificity of movement practice, and the language by which people articulate their discontent, understood through the 'cultural expressions of resistance'. In the early months of 1990 the people of Nepal arose against the autocratic rule of King Bircnclra in an attempt to reestablish a multiparty democratic system within the country. Although only partially successful (and although the nascent democ­ racy continues to be beset by political, economic, and cultural problems), the people's movement for democracy provides us with some important insights into the character and spirit of social movement agency. Both power and (urban) space were contested in Nepal. By an analysis of this terrain of resistance, I argue for a narrative of collective action that is subject centered and historically, spatially, and politicoculturally contextualized. An understanding of the spatial mediation of social movement agency can provide us with important insights into why movements occur where they do, the spatiocultural specificity of movement practice, and the language by which people articulate their discontent, understood through the 'cultural expressions of resistance'. This reading of the events in Nepal 1990 is a contribution to the critical discourse of a geopolitics that (de)centers analytical focus away from the state, and inquires into those 'voices on the periphery', who frequently pose challenges to state-centered notions of hegemony, consent, and power. Although political scientists may disagree as to whether the events in Nepal constitute a revolution, this is the name the people of Nepal give to the dramatic events of 1990, and it is, therefore, in respect for their struggles and sacrifices that I use the term in this paper.(1) (^Theoretically, the metanarrative of revolution can ignore social differences and particular­ ities, involve reified categories, transform moral and political conflicts into technical and metatheoretical disputes, and locate social movements within a purely temporal dimension (see Seidman, 1992). As such, it is of questionable explanatory power. Although Nepal's Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) was inspired by Eastern Europe's revo­ lutions of 1989, and although the communist factions within the movement also drew inspiration and influence from earlier revolutions and revolutionary theory, the events of spring 1990 were spatially contextualized within the specific political, economic, and cultural landscape of Nepal. As I will argue, a spatialized analysis, examines the local narrative of revolution, in this case as it was manifested in Nepal.

The boundaries of responsibility interpretations of geography in school desegregation cases

Abstract: The year 1994 is the twentieth anniversary of Milliken v. Bradley, 18 U.S. 717 (1974). It thus marks the halfway point between Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), and the present. It also marks the point in legal history at which the struggle against racially segregated education was turned back at the Detroit city limits. In this paper I examine how social actors strategically deployed legal concepts in efforts to reshape geographies of race and racism in the Detroit metropolitan area. My emphasis, though, is on how understandings of geographical phenomena were advanced in Milliken in order to justify legal arguments. In arguments and judgments, claims about the causes of segregation and about the spatiality of identity, agency, community, and intentionality were woven together into strategic geographical narratives that were designed to justify—or to justify the denial of—federal judicial intervention in the local spatial restructuring of race and schooling.

Compatibilists could have done otherwise: Responsibility and negative agency

Abstract: One is morally responsible for what one has done only if one could have done otherwise. Those who believe that moral responsibility is incompatible with causal determinism often invoke this principle, known as the Principle of Alternative Possibilities, to show that their position has a foothold in ordinary ways of thinking about the conditions of moral responsibility.' The incompatibilist assumes that whether an agent could have done otherwise in some situation depends on whether that agent could have acted differently in circumstances exactly the same as those that actually existed, and so infers that if determinism is true, this condition of moral responsibility is never satisfied. Interpreted in this way, the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (henceforth "PAP") states a metaphysical rather than a psychological condition of responsibility; one cannot ascertain whether it is satisfied by examining the agent's views, attitudes, and assumptions. Nevertheless, incompatibilists often support this principle by arguing that it is presupposed in our ordinary conception of ourselves as deliberators and agents.2 If determinism is true, then an important element in our self-conception as agents is simply a delusion, according to the incompatibilist, and the practice of holding people responsible for their actions that rests upon it is ungrounded-or at least not as well grounded as we ordinarily suppose.

Rehabilitating Nature and Making Nature Habitable

Abstract: Can nature be reconstituted, recreated or rehabilitated? And would the goal of doing so be a desirable one? There again, is wild nature intrinsically valuable, or are parks, gardens and farms sometimes preferable or of greater value? This cluster of questions arises from recent debates about preservation, restoration, wilderness and sustainable development. In discussing them I hope to throw some light on both the concept and the value of nature, and in due course on the attitudes which people should have towards it, the policies which should guide their practice, and thus on the proper role of humanity with regard to the natural world. To begin with, we need a clear sense of ‘nature’, and thus to turn to John Stuart Mill's celebrated essay on that subject (Mill, 1874). Now when the possibility of nature being restored is at issue, ‘nature’ cannot be used in Mill's first sense, ‘all which is—the powers and properties of all things’. For in this sense there is no possibility of nature being destroyed or damaged, let alone reconstructed. Mill's second sense of ‘nature’, rather, is the relevant one: ‘what takes place without … the voluntary and intentional agency of man [sic]’. Nature (in this sense) can obviously be modified by human activity. Moreover a difficulty already emerges about the possibility of restoring it: how can anything be restored by human agency the essence of which is to be independent of human agency? This is a question to which we shall return.