Virtues Of Cooperation Research Articles

Why Germany's Energiewende Reminds Us of the Virtues of Cooperation

More cooperation on the European level on support schemes for renewable technologies could leverage efficiency gains and help to optimise the use of resources.

Virtues in Participatory Design: Cooperation, Curiosity, Creativity, Empowerment and Reflexivity

In this essay several virtues are discussed that are needed in people who work in participatory design (PD). The term PD is used here to refer specifically to an approach in designing information systems with its roots in Scandinavia in the 1970s and 1980s. Through the lens of virtue ethics and based on key texts in PD, the virtues of cooperation, curiosity, creativity, empowerment and reflexivity are discussed. Cooperation helps people in PD projects to engage in cooperative curiosity and cooperative creativity. Curiosity helps them to empathize with others and their experiences, and to engage in joint learning. Creativity helps them to envision, try out and materialize ideas, and to jointly create new products and services. Empowerment helps them to share power and to enable other people to flourish. Moreover, reflexivity helps them to perceive and to modify their own thoughts, feelings and actions. In the spirit of virtue ethics-which focuses on specific people in concrete situations-several examples from one PD project are provided. Virtue ethics is likely to appeal to people in PD projects because it is practice-oriented, provides room for exploration and experimentation, and promotes professional and personal development. In closing, some ideas for practical application, for education and for further research are discussed.

Property-Owning Democracy, Civic Education, and the Reasonable Surfer

Property-Owning Democracy, Civic Education, and the Reasonable Surfer

Community, cooperation and metropolitan democracy

The discourse of local governance in Britain has placed heavy emphasis on the concept of community and the virtues of cooperation. This paper looks at the origins of this discourse in the 19th century and the reasons for its revival at the end of the 20th century. It argues that there is a tension between the formal structures of representative local government and the desire to encourage community involvement. But it concludes that the increasing complexity is an inevitable consequence of the complexity of modern metropolitan life and that the problem is to ensure the legitimacy and accountability of the new structures created.

Equality Within Military Organizations

In this paper, I wish to discover whether there is some mark or feature common to all of the warfighting cooperative virtues, playing an essential, identifiable role in the intentions presupposed by each. While the fundamental intention not to harm innocents constrains and informs external justice (jus in bello) in the moral craft of warfighting, a similar intention constrains and informs justice internal to warfighting organizations. As I shall argue, ‘equality of innocence’, understood as ‘no harm’, serves a fundamental role within the intentions of internal justice at play for cooperative warfighting teams that excel. By ‘equality of innocence’ understood as ‘no harm,’ which plays some role within any martial cooperative virtue, I mean this: no one is to be harmed unless his contributions to the warfighting team are not what they ought to be. ‘No harm’ is an implicit expectation of virtuous soldiers, and it must be a part of the implicit and explicit norms of any excellent warfighting organization as well. This equality of intention along with the formal equality within military law [for example, the US Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ)] are the only forms of equality in intentions that should be operative within hierarchical warfighting units given their architectonic warfighting activity of winning their nation's wars. This ‘equality of innocence’ represented by ‘no harm’ results further in an atmosphere of trust within the warfighting unit, where guile is minimized—if not eliminated—as a requirement for excellence internal to the warfighting unit. An atmosphere of excellence for the whole can then be best realized when such trust obtains.

Picture This

The authors provide a multicultural feminist analysis of picture books for children by looking at the illustrations and listening carefully to themes of oppression and resistance in 33 picture books that focus on characters that are on the powerless side of some powerless/powerful social dichotomy. The authors find many images that either depict oppression or celebrate difference. They also find stories that extol the virtues of cooperation among similarly oppressed others, cooperation among differently oppressed others, and escape. They annotate the books to provide some sense of the themes of oppression and resistance that appear in each of them.

American Family Law: HiStory-WhoStory

Family law should be rooted in preserving and protecting intimate relationships; instead, it is rooted in preserving those domestic systems that created or expanded the economic empire of the Founding Fathers, the white males of the colonial northeast. This northeastern colonial perspective continues to underpin most of the basic assumptions in family law. Concurrently, with the increased privatization of the cooperative virtues, Americans have developed an excessive preoccupation with self and a cult of consumerism. Consumerism has driven American society toward increased individualism and narcissism. A by-product of the increased individual-consumer culture is the mistaken belief that our personal values and security depend on the things each of us has yet to acquire, rather than on our relationships with others. Traditional family law history views the modern era as a time when women moved up from the confines of the private sphere into the egalitarian public sphere. Many minority ethnic and racial groups offer a communal spirit to American culture. It is the call of the pilgrim church to infiltrate and humanize institutional structures: as prophet to confront and challenge power, as priest-mediator to seek solidarity, and as servant-king to minister to the needs of the marginalized.

Reversing the Protections

The distinction between the public and the private in this symposium is, I will assume, continuous with both the communitarian-autonomy and responsibilities-rights distinctions in other symposia. I will also assume that issues about what should remain private are linked to issues of privacy and autonomy and that issues about what should remain public are linked to issues about the common good and community control. The moral and political theories most closely aligned with these distinctions are individualism and communitarianism. By a liberal individualist, I mean a person who holds that a specified social space should be carved out within which the individual is protected in the pursuit of personal projects. A communitarian, by contrast, holds that public policies should be derived primarily from communal values, the common good, social goals, traditional practices, and the cooperative virtues. Any well-ordered society will leave room to maneuver between these two poles of protecting public interests and protecting private interests. Various political systems may be slanted more heavily in one direction than the other, but to exclude the one or the other, or to rigidly close off the possibility of shifts from an emphasis on the one or the other would not be an acceptable political system. It is not surprising that we periodically find ourselves redrawing the boundaries between the public and the private. Unless we are committed to a radical communitarian or libertarian philosophy, we will expect a balance between the two to be struck in different ways as cases and circumstances turn our eyes to new consequences of policies and new social needs. This thesis should be sufficiently noncontroversial that it needs no defense. More pertinent are the specific ways in which society is at present seesawing in the attempt to preserve an appropriate balance between the public interest and the private. Here I can only give some examples and suggest some ways we can increase protections for either the public or the private. I choose two issues in bioethics that should illustrate this seesawing tendency and its desirability: euthanasia decisions and the collection of organs and tissues as social resources. Controversies about euthanasia have been driven by a strong sense that decisions to end a human life are inherently public matters because of the consequences for society that would flow from poor or uncontrolled decisionmaking. The focus and priority has been on the public interest, rather than on autonomy interests. By contrast, controversies about the collection of organs and tissues have been driven by a strong sense that decisions to harvest organs are matters for private decisionmaking. …

The Idea Of An Overlapping Consensus

Thus, when justice as fairness begins from the fundamental intuitive idea of society as a fair system of cooperation and proceeds to elaborate that idea, the resulting conception of political justice may be said to be abstract. It is abstract in the same way that the conception of a perfectly competitive market, or of general economic equilibrium, is abstract: that is, it singles out, or focuses on, certain aspects of society as especially significant from the standpoint of political justice and leaves others aside. But whether the conception that results itself is general and comprehensive, as I have used those terms, is a separate question. I believe the conflicts implicit in the fact of pluralism force political philosophy to present conceptions of justice that are abstract, if it is to achieve its aims; but the same conflicts prevent those conceptions from being general and comprehensive. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.186 on Sun, 09 Oct 2016 04:21:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms x6 THE IDEA OF AN OVERLAPPING CONSENSUS view in our model case: namely, a political conception of justice regarded not as a consequence of a comprehensive doctrine but as in itself sufficient to express values that normally outweigh whatever other values oppose them, at least under the reasonably favourable conditions that make a constitutional democracy possible. Here the criterion of a just regime is specified by that political conception; and the values in question are seen from its principles and standards, and from its account of the cooperative virtues of political justice, and the like. Those who hold this conception have, of course, other views as well, views that specify values and virtues belonging to other parts of life; they differ from citizens holding the two other views in our example of an overlapping consensus in having no fully (as opposed to partially)25 comprehensive doctrine within which they see all values and virtues as being ordered. They don't say such a doctrine is impossible, but rather practically speaking unnecessary. Their conviction is that, within the scope allowed by the basic liberties and the other provisions of a just constitution, all citizens can pursue their way of life on fair terms and properly respect its (non-public) values. So long as those constitutional guarantees are secure, they think no conflict of values is likely to arise that would justify their opposing the political conception as a whole, or on such fundamental matters as liberty of conscience, or equal political liberties, or basic civil rights, and the like. Those holding this partially comprehensive view might explain it as follows. We should not assume that there exist reasonable and generally acceptable answers for all or even for many questions of political justice that might be asked. Rather, we must be prepared to accept the fact that only a few such questions can be satisfactorily resolved. Political wisdom consists in identifying those few, and among them the most urgent. That done, we must frame the institutions of the basic structure so that intractable conflicts are unlikely to arise; we must also accept the need for clear and simple principles, the general form and content of which we hope can be publicly understood. A political conception is at best but a guiding framework of deliberation and reflection which helps us reach political agreement on at least the constitutional essentials. If it seems to have cleared our view and made our considered convictions more coherent; if it has narrowed the gap between the conscientious convictions of those who accept the basic ideas of a constitutional regime, then it has served its practical political purpose. And this remains true even though we can't fully explain our agreement: we know only that citizens who affirm the political conception, and who have been raised in and are familiar with-the fundamental ideas of the public political culture, find that, when they adopt its framework of deliberation, their judgments converge sufficiently so that political cooperation on the basis of mutual respect can be maintained. They view the political conception as itself normally sufficient and may not expect, or think they need, greater political understanding than that. 25 For the distinction between a doctrine's being fully vs partially comprehensive, see footnote 23 in Sec IV. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.186 on Sun, 09 Oct 2016 04:21:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms