Golden Rule (golden + rule)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


ABC's, 123's, and the Golden Rule: The Pacifying Effect of Education on Civil War, 1980,1999

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2006
CLAYTON L. THYNE
This study examines two ways by which education might affect the probability of civil war onset. First, educational investment provides a strong signal to the people that the government is attempting to improve their lives, which is apt to lower grievances, even in desperate times. Second, education can generate economic, political, and social stability by giving people tools with which they can resolve disputes peacefully, making them less likely to incur the risks involved in joining a rebellion. This theory is tested by examining the effect of educational expenditures, enrollment levels, and literacy rates on the probability of civil war onset from 1980 through 1999. The results provide evidence for both the grievance and stability arguments, providing strong support for the pacifying effects of education on civil war. [source]


The Golden Rule and the Potentiality Principle: Future Persons and Contingent Interests

JOURNAL OF APPLIED PHILOSOPHY, Issue 1 2004
Kai M. A. Chan
abstract,Duties to future persons are central to numerous key ethical issues including contraception, abortion, genetic selection, treatment of the environment, and population control. Nevertheless, we still seem to be lacking Parfit's ,Theory X', a general theory of beneficence whose appropriateness extends to future generations. Starting from the Golden Rule (TGR), R. M. Hare purportedly derived counterintuitive duties to potential people and ,the potentiality principle'. However, I argue that Hare's derivation involves a hidden and unjustifiable extension from TGR, and show how the most plausible form of TGR is compatible with multiple contradictory principles for the treatment of future persons. I appeal to our own preferences to argue that one extension of TGR follows the spirit of TGR, while the other is deeply implausible. Using the plausible extension, I derive a Contingent Interests Principle (CIP) that offers much promise as Parfit's elusive Theory X. In contrast to Hare's interpretation of TGR, this application provides solid justification for rejecting the potentiality principle. [source]


Humanitarian Intervention, Altruism, and the Limits of Casuistry

JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS, Issue 1 2000
Richard B. Miller
This essay argues that the ethics of humanitarian intervention cannot be readily subsumed by the ethics of just war without due attention to matters of political and moral motivation. In the modern era, a just war draws directly from self-benefitting motives in wars of self-defense, or indirectly in wars that enforce international law or promote the global common good. Humanitarian interventions, in contrast, are intuitively admirable insofar as they are other-regarding. That difference poses a challenge to the casuistry of humanitarian intervention because it makes it difficult to reason by analogy from the case of war to the case of humanitarian intervention. The author develops this point in dialogue with Michael Walzer, the U.S. Catholic bishops, and President Clinton. He concludes by showing how a casuistry of intervention is possible, developing a motivational rationale that draws on the Golden Rule. [source]


Beyond Balancing: Toward an Integrated Approach to Children's Rights

JOURNAL OF SOCIAL ISSUES, Issue 4 2008
Gary B. Melton
Discussions of children's rights often are framed in terms of balancing,balancing parents' and children's rights, balancing rights to autonomy and protection, balancing rights and responsibilities. By its nature, such a comparative inquiry pulls for relativist reasoning, but such an approach undermines the universalism that is at the root of the concept of human rights. Like the international human rights instruments that preceded it, the Convention on the Rights of the Child is based on "recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family." Whether grounded in religious or secular ethical reasoning, human rights are directed toward a world in which the Golden Rule,a regime of mutual respect,serves as the guidepost for the social order. Building from that premise, recommendations are offered for social scientists' contributions to creation and preservation of such societies. [source]


Public Investment, the Stability Pact and the ,Golden Rule'

FISCAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2000
Fabrizio Balassone
Abstract The fiscal rules set in the Treaty of Maastricht and in the Stability and Growth Pact have sometimes been criticised as an excessively binding constraint for appropriate counter-cyclical action. The risk that the rules may permanently reduce the public sector's contribution to capital accumulation has also been pointed out. In this framework, the adoption of a ,golden rule' has been suggested. Starting from the recent debate, this paper tackles two questions: (a) the implications of the Pact for public investment and (b) the pros and cons of introducing a golden rule in EMU's fiscal framework, given the objectives of low public debts and adequate margins for a stabilising budgetary policy. The analysis suggests that the rules set in the Treaty and in the Pact may negatively influence public investment spending. However, the golden rule, although intuitively appealing, does not seem to be an appropriate solution to the problem. [source]


The Phelps,Koopmans theorem and potential optimality

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY, Issue 1 2010
Debraj Ray
D90; O41 The Phelps,Koopmans theorem states that if every limit point of a path of capital stocks exceeds the "golden rule," then that path is inefficient: there is another feasible path from the same initial stock that provides at least as much consumption at every date and strictly more consumption at some date. I show that in a model with nonconvex technologies and preferences, the theorem is false in a strong sense. Not only can there be efficient paths with capital stocks forever above and bounded away from a unique golden rule, such paths can also be optimal under the infinite discounted sum of a one-period utility function. The paper makes clear, moreover, that this latter criterion is strictly more demanding than the efficiency of a path. [source]


Debt, Growth and Budgetary Regimes

BULLETIN OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH, Issue 3 2004
Sugata Ghosh
E62; H41; O40 Abstract Within the Barro (1990) model of productive public services, but with the inclusion of public debt, we derive and characterize on the balanced growth path, a set of welfare-maximizing fiscal rules under two budgetary regimes , one with only the standard dynamic government budget constraint, and the other involving the golden rule of public finance. We demonstrate analytically that the optimal fiscal policy differs in the two budgetary regimes considered. We also analyse two cases within the second regime: one, where the ratio of current spending to tax revenues is parametrically given, and another, where this ratio is optimally chosen by the government. [source]


Public Investment, the Stability Pact and the ,Golden Rule'

FISCAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2000
Fabrizio Balassone
Abstract The fiscal rules set in the Treaty of Maastricht and in the Stability and Growth Pact have sometimes been criticised as an excessively binding constraint for appropriate counter-cyclical action. The risk that the rules may permanently reduce the public sector's contribution to capital accumulation has also been pointed out. In this framework, the adoption of a ,golden rule' has been suggested. Starting from the recent debate, this paper tackles two questions: (a) the implications of the Pact for public investment and (b) the pros and cons of introducing a golden rule in EMU's fiscal framework, given the objectives of low public debts and adequate margins for a stabilising budgetary policy. The analysis suggests that the rules set in the Treaty and in the Pact may negatively influence public investment spending. However, the golden rule, although intuitively appealing, does not seem to be an appropriate solution to the problem. [source]