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Human Interests (human + interest)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences66%

Selected Abstracts

Violence in Bloomsbury: A Theological Challenge

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY, Issue 3 2006
OLIVER DAVIES
The terrorist attacks in London on 7 July 2005 are subjected to hermeneutical analysis as cultural and political signs, and are seen to reflect an extreme version of religious and social incommensurability. They present a theological challenge, the response to which is the development of a positive theological account of world. This comes into view in London, the ,City of the Incommensurable', in a special way, since it is nevertheless a domain of negotiated time and space and an environment held by many in common. This environment of pluralism and proximity is taken to be both iconic of globalization and a particularly dynamic locus of its many instantiations. The intersection of global and local, and the kinds of encounters it supports, argue for a new kind of theology which, with all its proper resources in scripture, doctrine and tradition, can recognize the world as sphere of common human interests and practices, and can allow itself to become, in accordance with its own incarnational ground, an agent of transformation within it. [source]

The concept of health: beyond normativism and naturalism

JOURNAL OF EVALUATION IN CLINICAL PRACTICE, Issue 2 2010
Richard P. Hamilton BA (Hons) MPhil PhD PGCE
Abstract Philosophical discussions of health and disease have traditionally been dominated by a debate between normativists, who hold that health is an inescapably value-laded concept and naturalists, such as Christopher Boorse, who believe that it is possible to derive a purely descriptive or theoretical definition of health based upon biological function. In this paper I defend a distinctive view which traces its origins in Aristotle's naturalistic ethics. An Arisotelian would agree with Boorse that health and disease are ubiquitous features of the natural world and thus not mere projections of human interests and values. She would differ from him in rejecting the idea that value is a non-natural quality. I conclude my discussion with some comments of the normative character of living systems. [source]

Framing Anti-Americanism and the Media in South Korea: TV vs Newspaper,

PACIFIC FOCUS, Issue 3 2009
Yongho Kim
This study indicates a stark contrast between the frames by TV news and that of the major newspapers in the coverage of the two candlelight demonstrations in 2002 and 2008 in South Korea. The contrast implies that the frames used by TV news and major newspapers were constructed by two different thematic frames that competed for dominance in public concern: national interest on the one hand, and national prestige and human interests on the other. The TV news framed stories on the 2002 Yangju county accident and the import of American beef in ways to trigger anti-Americanism, which was contrasted with major newspapers' consistent emphasis on national interest. Difference in ownership, target audience and the degree of dependence on advertising sponsors offered plausible explanations for the difference in frames. In addition, the number of journalists going into politics also offered insights into why TV news and newspapers framed the 2002 Yangju county accident and the import of US beef in very unique ways, either by triggering anti-demonstrations or by tranquilizing protests through emphasizing national interests. Overall, difference in frames between major TV news and major newspaper stories represents ideological difference in the public opinion over conservatives versus progressives. [source]

Justice and Culture: Rawls, Sen, Nussbaum and O'Neill

POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 1 2003
Cécile Fabre
Is it possible, in a multicultural world, to hold all societies to a common standard of decency that is both high enough to protect basic human interests, and yet not biased in the direction of particular cultural values? We examine the recent work of four liberals , John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum and Onora O'Neill , to see whether any of them has given a successful answer to this question. For Rawls, the decency standard is set by reference to an idea of basic human rights that we argue offers too little protection to members of non-liberal societies. Sen and Nussbaum both employ the idea of human capabilities, but in interestingly different ways: for Sen the problems are how to weight different capabilities, and how to decide which are basic, whereas for Nussbaum the difficulty is that her favoured list of capabilities depends on an appeal to autonomy that is unlikely to be acceptable to non-liberal cultures. O'Neill rejects a rights-based approach in favour of a neo-Kantian position that asks which principles of action people everywhere could consent to, but this also may be too weak in the face of cultural diversity. We conclude that liberals need to argue both for a minimum decency standard and for the full set of liberal rights as the best guarantors of that standard over time. [source]

Animals, Ethics and Public Policy

THE POLITICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 1 2010
ROBERT GARNER
In orthodox moral thinking in the West, animals count for something but human interests take precedence. It is argued that this moral orthodoxy or animal welfare position is flawed. It fails to take into account that some animals, like humans, are persons and that some, so-called ,marginal' humans lack personhood. More importantly, although it is likely that animals do not have an interest in liberty for its own sake and have less of an interest in continued life than humans, there is little justification for the animal welfare claim that an animal's suffering should be regarded as less important morally than that of a human. It is concluded that the adoption of a ,sentiency position', whereby animals have a right not to suffer, has radical implications for the way animals are treated, ruling out intensive forms of animal agriculture and those scientific procedures that inflict suffering as morally illegitimate. [source]

High genetic divergence in miniature breeds of Japanese native chickens compared to Red Junglefowl, as revealed by microsatellite analysis

ANIMAL GENETICS, Issue 1 2008
R. Tadano
Summary A wide diversity of domesticated chicken breeds exist due to artificial selection on the basis of human interests. Miniature variants (bantams) are eminently illustrative of the large changes from ancestral junglefowls. In this report, the genetic characterization of seven Japanese miniature chicken breeds and varieties, together with institute-kept Red Junglefowl, was conducted by means of typing 40 microsatellites located on 21 autosomes. We drew focus to genetic differentiation between the miniature chicken breeds and Red Junglefowl in particular. A total of 305 alleles were identified: 27 of these alleles (8.9%) were unique to the Red Junglefowl with high frequencies (>20%). Significantly high genetic differences (FST) were obtained between Red Junglefowl and all other breeds with a range of 0.3901,0.5128. Individual clustering (constructed from combinations of the proportion of shared alleles and the neighbour-joining method) indicated high genetic divergence among breeds including Red Junglefowl. There were also individual assignments on the basis of the Bayesian and distance-based approaches. The microsatellite differences in the miniature chicken breeds compared to the presumed wild ancestor reflected the phenotypic diversity among them, indicating that each of these miniature chicken breeds is a unique gene pool. [source]