Towards the Ethics of a Green Future
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Ngos: a Primer on the Evolution of the Organizations That Are Setting the Next Generation of "Regulations"
NGOs: A Primer on the Evolution of the Organizations That Are Setting the Next Generation of “Regulations” Nongovernmental responsibility organizations Nongovernmental organizations (EHS&SR) profes- (NGOs) have been sionals who are around for more exercise a growing influence spending more and than 150 years. Over more of their time the last decade, over business on “nonregula- however, there has tory” issues driven been a subtle but by NGOs. steady shift in the nature of their influence over business. Background: NGOs as De Facto Rulemakers In essence, NGOs are beginning to act increas- The current dynamics between NGOs and the ingly like governmental regulatory agencies, issu- business world have been described in an article ing a new generation of de facto “regulations” in that we published in Corporate Environmental the form of standards, guidelines, and certifica- Strategy.1 In summary, that article presented the tions. Once gadflies and outsiders, NGOs increas- case that, until recently, it has been governments ingly are shifting to market-based approaches in that have defined corporate responsibility; com- order to effect change and gain a prominent place panies have tracked the environmental, health, at the table in stakeholder negotiations. safety, and social responsibility metrics dictated What are NGOs, and how did these organiza- by those government-defined laws and regula- tions evolve? What types of NGOs exist, and how tions. Not surprisingly, business executives have are they classified? How do they operate and wield responded to EHS&SR issues narrowly, viewing their power? And what are the critical issues they face if they want to expand their influence? This article offers a literature review of pub- Brijesh Nalinakumari lished information on NGOs. -
Regulating Corporations
PROVISIONAL EDITION Regulating Corporations A Resource Guide Désirée Abrahams* Geneva • December 2004 * Désirée Abrahams prepared this report during 2003 and early 2004, when she was a Research Assistant at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) in Geneva, Switzerland. The author would like to thank Peter Utting, Kate Ives and Anita Tombez for their research and editorial support. The report was prepared under the UNRISD project “Promoting Corporate Social and Environmental Responsibility in Developing Countries: The Potential and Limits of Voluntary Initiatives”, which is partly funded by the MacArthur Foundation. This edition may be subject to minor modifications and copy-editing prior to formal publication. The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) is an autonomous agency engaging in multidisciplinary research on the social dimensions of contemporary problems affecting development. Its work is guided by the conviction that, for effective development policies to be formulated, an understanding of the social and political context is crucial. The Institute attempts to provide governments, development agencies, grassroots organizations and scholars with a better understanding of how development policies and processes of economic, social and environmental change affect different social groups. Working through an extensive network of national research centres, UNRISD aims to promote original research and strengthen research capacity in developing countries. Current research programmes include: Civil Society and Social Movements; Democracy, Governance and Human Rights; Identities, Conflict and Cohesion; Social Policy and Development; and Technology, Business and Society. A list of the Institute’s free and priced publications can be obtained by contacting: UNRISD Reference Centre Palais des Nations 1211 Geneva 10 Switzerland Tel +41 (0)22 917 3020 Fax +41 (0)22 917 0650 [email protected] www.unrisd.org Copyright © United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. -
1 Commissioner Karel De Gucht European Commissioner for Trade European Commission BE-1049 Brussels May 19, 2014 Civil Society
Commissioner Karel de Gucht European Commissioner for Trade European Commission BE-1049 Brussels May 19, 2014 Civil society call for full transparency about the EU-US trade negotiations Dear Commissioner De Gucht, The undersigned organisations are writing to express deep concerns about the lack of transparency around the ongoing trade talks on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). We are calling on you to open the negotiation process to the public, by releasing the negotiating mandate, documents submitted by the EU, and negotiating texts. The European Commission has repeatedly stated that trade and investment between the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) are already highly integrated, and that the main focus of TTIP will be to achieve regulatory convergence by removing so-called non-tariff barriers to trade. This means that the outcome has much less to do with traditional trade issues such as tariffs, than with the regulations and standards that apply in the EU and the US and that affect every single aspect of citizens’ daily lives – from the quality of the food we eat to the safety of chemicals we use, the energy we consume, or the impact of financial services on each of us. Civil society groups in the EU and in the US have voiced concerns that this might lower standards and remove safeguards across the board. They have requested greater transparency about the negotiations to address these concerns. The setting up of a stakeholder advisory group for the negotiations by the EU – although an improvement compared to previous negotiations – is far from sufficient to make the process fully transparent. -
Inter-American Court on Human Rights
INTER-AMERICAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS ADVISORY OPINION OC-23/17 OF NOVEMBER 15, 2017 REQUESTED BY THE REPUBLIC OF COLOMBIA THE ENVIRONMENT AND HUMAN RIGHTS (STATE OBLIGATIONS IN RELATION TO THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE CONTEXT OF THE PROTECTION AND GUARANTEE OF THE RIGHTS TO LIFE AND TO PERSONAL INTEGRITY: INTERPRETATION AND SCOPE OF ARTICLES 4(1) AND 5(1) IN RELATION TO ARTICLES 1(1) AND 2 OF THE AMERICAN CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS) the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (hereinafter “the Inter-American Court” or “the Court”), composed of the following judges: Roberto F. Caldas, President Eduardo Ferrer Mac-Gregor Poisot, Vice President Eduardo Vio Grossi, Judge Humberto Antonio Sierra Porto Judge Elizabeth Odio Benito, Judge Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni, Judge, and L. Patricio Pazmiño Freire, Judge also present, Pablo Saavedra Alessandri, Secretary, and Emilia Segares Rodríguez, Deputy Secretary, pursuant to Article 64(1) of the American Convention on Human Rights (hereinafter “the American Convention” or “the Convention”) and Articles 70 to 75 of the Rules of Procedure of the Court (hereinafter “the Rules of Procedure”), issues the following advisory opinion, structured as follows: - 2 - TABLE OF CONTENTS I. PRESENTATION OF THE REQUEST ........................................................................................ 4 II. PROCEEDING BEFORE THE COURT ...................................................................................... 6 III. JURISDICTION AND ADMISSIBILITY ............................................................................. -
Jerry Fodor · Why Pigs Don't Have Wings: the Case Against Natural Selection
This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse this site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. (More Information) × LOG IN REGISTER FOR ONLINE ACCESS Search the LRB LATEST ARCHIVE BOOKSHOP CONTACT US ABOUT THE LRB SUBSCRIBE INTRODUCTION BACK ISSUES CONTRIBUTORS CATEGORIES LETTERS AUDIO VIDEO Vol. 29 No. 20 · 18 October 2007 facebook214 twitter 14 share email letter cite print pages 19-22 | 5138 words ‘We are larger | smaller now at our Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings most unequal Jerry Fodor since 1940’ You are invited to read this free essay from the London Review of Books. Ben Rawlence Register for free and enjoy 24 hours of access to the entire LRB archive @ LRB blog Jerry Fodor has of over 12,500 essays and reviews. almost finished a book, with Zenon Pylyshyn, Die Meistersinger is, by Wagner’s standards, quite a cheerful opera. The action turns on comedy’s staple, the marriage plot: get the hero and the heroine safely and truly wed about the semantics of with at least a presumption of happiness ever after. There are cross-currents and mental representation. undercurrents that make Meistersinger’s libretto subtle in ways that the librettos of He teaches at Rutgers. operas usually aren’t. But for once Nietzsche is nowhere in sight and nobody dies; the territory is closer to The Barber of Seville than to The Ring. Yet, in the first scene of Act 3, the avuncular Hans Sachs, whose benevolent interventions smooth the lovers’ MORE BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR course, delivers an aria of bitter reflection on the human condition. -
Clientearth Company Limited by Guarantee Consolidated Financial Statements for the Year Ended 31 December 2013
Charity Registration No. 1053988 Company Registration No. 2863827 (England and Wales) CLIENTEARTH COMPANY LIMITED BY GUARANTEE CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2013 CLIENTEARTH COMPANY LIMITED BY GUARANTEE LEGAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE INFORMATION Trustees S Hockman M Mclntosh W Mclntosh M Robert M Stanley The Honorable E Young P Harvey B Eno H Jones H Tinsley F Serfaty Secretary BWB Secretarial Limted Charity number 1053988 Company number 2863827 Principal address The Hothouse 274 Richmond Road London E8 3QW Registered office 2-6 Cannon Street London EC4M 6YH Auditors Arram Berlyn Gardner 30 City Road London EC1Y 2AB CLIENTEARTH COMPANY LIMITED BY GUARANTEE CONTENTS Page Trustees' report Statement of trustees' responsibilities 18 Independent auditors' report 19-20 Statement of financial activities 21 Balance sheet —Group 18 Balance sheet - Parent 19 Notes to the accounts 24- 38 CLIENTEARTH COMPANY LIMITED BY GUARANTEE TRUSTEES' REPORT FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2013 The trustees (who are also the directors of ClientEarth for the purposes of company law) present their report and accounts for the period ended 3t December 2013. The accounts have been prepared in accordance with the accounting policies set out in note t to the accounts and comply with the Companies Act 2006 and the Statement of Recommended Practice, 'Accounting and Reporting by Charities', issued in March 2005. Objectives and activities The charity's objects are: ~ To promote and encourage the enhancement, restoration, conservation and protection -
Alvaro Moreno Matteo Mossio a Philosophical and Theoretical Enquiry
History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences Alvaro Moreno Matteo Mossio Biological Autonomy A Philosophical and Theoretical Enquiry History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences Volume 12 Editors Charles T. Wolfe, Ghent University, Belgium Philippe Huneman, IHPST (CNRS/Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne), France Thomas A.C. Reydon, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany Editorial Board Marshall Abrams (University of Alabama at Birmingham) Andre Ariew (Missouri) Minus van Baalen (UPMC, Paris) Domenico Bertoloni Meli (Indiana) Richard Burian (Virginia Tech) Pietro Corsi (EHESS, Paris) François Duchesneau (Université de Montréal) John Dupré (Exeter) Paul Farber (Oregon State) Lisa Gannett (Saint Mary’s University, Halifax) Andy Gardner (Oxford) Paul Griffiths (Sydney) Jean Gayon (IHPST, Paris) Guido Giglioni (Warburg Institute, London) Thomas Heams (INRA, AgroParisTech, Paris) James Lennox (Pittsburgh) Annick Lesne (CNRS, UPMC, Paris) Tim Lewens (Cambridge) Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh) Alexandre Métraux (Archives Poincaré, Nancy) Hans Metz (Leiden) Roberta Millstein (Davis) Staffan Müller-Wille (Exeter) Dominic Murphy (Sydney) François Munoz (Université Montpellier 2) Stuart Newman (New York Medical College) Frederik Nijhout (Duke) Samir Okasha (Bristol) Susan Oyama (CUNY) Kevin Padian (Berkeley) David Queller (Washington University, St Louis) Stéphane Schmitt (SPHERE, CNRS, Paris) Phillip Sloan (Notre Dame) Jacqueline Sullivan (Western University, London, ON) Giuseppe Testa (IFOM-IEA, Milano) J. Scott Turner (Syracuse) Denis -
The Philosophy of Biology Edited by David L
Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-85128-2 - The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Biology Edited by David L. Hull and Michael Ruse Frontmatter More information the cambridge companion to THE PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY The philosophy of biology is one of the most exciting new areas in the field of philosophy and one that is attracting much attention from working scientists. This Companion, edited by two of the founders of the field, includes newly commissioned essays by senior scholars and by up-and- coming younger scholars who collectively examine the main areas of the subject – the nature of evolutionary theory, classification, teleology and function, ecology, and the prob- lematic relationship between biology and religion, among other topics. Up-to-date and comprehensive in its coverage, this unique volume will be of interest not only to professional philosophers but also to students in the humanities and researchers in the life sciences and related areas of inquiry. David L. Hull is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. The author of numerous books and articles on topics in systematics, evolutionary theory, philosophy of biology, and naturalized epistemology, he is a recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Michael Ruse is professor of philosophy at Florida State University. He is the author of many books on evolutionary biology, including Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? and Darwinism and Its Discontents, both published by Cam- bridge University Press. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he has appeared on television and radio, and he contributes regularly to popular media such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Playboy magazine. -
Neo-Paleyan Biology
1 Neo-Paleyan Biology Tim Lewens University of Cambridge Department of History and Philosophy of Science Free School Lane Cambridge CB2 3RH Email: [email protected] Abstract There is a ‘Neo-Paleyan’ tradition in British evolutionary theorising, which began with Darwin and continues to the present day. This tradition conceives of adaptation in terms of design, and it often puts natural selection in the role of an ersatz designer. There are significant disanalogies between Paleyan conceptions of design and modern conceptions of adaptation and selection, which help to explain why the neo-Paleyan programme is sometimes treated with hostility. These general disanalogies do not suffice to dismiss the most interesting forms of recent neo-Paleyanism, which draw on theoretical principles such as Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem to ground a general approach to what we can call (following Grafen) the ‘criterion’ of evolutionary design. It is important to distinguish between justifications of this ‘criterion’ and justifications of approaches to nature which presuppose that natural selection produces good designs. 2 Keywords: Adaptation, Andy Gardner, Alan Grafen, Design, Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem, William Paley Funding This work was funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. I am also grateful to the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, for support during the completion of this project. Acknowledgements Earlier versions of this paper were presented in Copenhagen, Oulu and Paris. I am grateful to audiences there, and to the referees from this journal for comments. I am especially grateful to Jean-Baptiste Grodwohl for remarkably detailed and penetrating remarks on the submitted manuscript, and to Andy Gardner, Jonathan Birch and Samir Okasha for additional suggestions for improvements and clarifications. -
Phd Thesis Andreas Christiansen
The Ethics of Synthetic Biology Respecting Life and Managing Risk Christiansen, Andreas Publication date: 2016 Document version Other version Document license: CC BY-NC-ND Citation for published version (APA): Christiansen, A. (2016). The Ethics of Synthetic Biology: Respecting Life and Managing Risk. Det Humanistiske Fakultet, Københavns Universitet. Download date: 28. sep.. 2021 UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN FACULTY OF HUMANITIES PhD Thesis Andreas Christiansen The Ethics of Synthetic Biology Respecting Life and Managing Risk Advisor: Sune Holm Submitted: 31/08/2016 1 The Ethics of Synthetic Biology: Respecting Life and Managing Risk PhD Thesis By Andreas Christiansen Department of Media, Cognition and Communication Section of Philosophy Academic advisor: Sune Holm Submitted 31 August 2016 Word count: 50.700 2 Table of contents Acknowledgements 2 Article overview 4 Introduction 6 Article 1 Synthetic Biology and the Moral Significance of Artificial Life 70 Article 2 Similarity Arguments in the Genetic Modification Debate 92 Article 3 Rationality, Thresholds and the Precautionary Principle 126 Article 4 On the Cognitive Argument for Cost-Benefit Analysis 156 Resume 192 Summary 193 References 194 Acknowledgements My biggest debt is to my advisor, Sune Holm. Sune has provided detailed comments on the entire thesis and on several drafts that never made it into the final products, which no doubt improved the final product. He has been enormously encouraging and helpful, which has made the transition from being a student to a researcher much easier and less frightening than it might otherwise have been. Apart from Sune, several people have read parts of the dissertation or earlier drafts. I want to thank Martin Marchman Andersen, Karin Jønch Clausen, Klemens Kappel, Esben Høgh, Tom Douglas, Julian Savulescu, Michael Plant, Carissa Véliz, Norbert Paulo, Maria Serban, Tanja Rechnitzer, Josefine Pallavicini and Johanna Privitera for providing helpful comments and criticisms. -
Part IV: Enabling Policies and Action to Support Innovative Solutions
IV. Enabling policies and action to support innovative solutions © Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock Part IV Enabling policies and action to support innovative solutions About Part IV Advancing a chemistry that is fully sustainable is dependent on scaling up innovative solutions; engaging new actors; and putting in place enabling policies. Innovative solutions complement long-standing measures to achieve the sound management of chemicals and waste, as discussed in Part III. They are an essential element in achieving the sound management of chemicals and waste. While the topics discussed in Part IV have been the subject of discussions and action taken at national and international level to varying degrees, they have by and large not received the attention warranted in the context of chemicals and waste. Opportunities therefore exist to explore their role in a beyond 2020 framework. Relevant enabling policies and actions include education reform; support for technology innovation and financing; innovative business models; sustainable supply chain management; private sector metrics and reporting; fiscal incentives; and the empowerment of workers, consumers and citizens through information and participation rights. In exploring these topics, Part IV thus also draws attention to the contributions that can be made by a diverse range of actors, including entrepreneurs, academics, retailers, policymakers and citizens. Contents 1/ Envisioning and shaping the future of chemistry 504 2/ Green and sustainable chemistry education: nurturing a new generation -
OHCHR Submissions for the EBRD's Draft Environmental and Social Policy
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Recommendations for EBRD’s Environmental and Social Policy (ESP) 15 March 2019 Introduction 1. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) welcomes the opportunity to comment on the revised draft Environmental and Social Policy (ESP) of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Bank’s (EBRD or “Bank”). 2. Given OHCHR’s mandate, as well as the constraints of time, OHCHR’s comments focus principally on the content and potential impacts of the draft safeguards from the perspective of international human rights law, particularly in relation to social risk management, accompanied by specific comments and recommendations in relation to draft Performance Requirements 2, 5, 7, 9 and 10. We note that the EBRD is among the leaders in seeking to align its ESP with international human rights legal standards, for reasons which cannot be attributed to the EBRD’s explicitly “political” mandate, alone.1 Our comments aim to further strengthen these attributes of the ESP, to help ensure that the ESP is implemented in accordance with the evolving and contextual specificities of international human rights law, for more sustainable development outcomes and superior long- run investment returns. Environmental and Social Policy Human rights 3. OHCHR welcomes the EBRD’S reaffirmed commitment not to “knowingly finance projects that would contravene national laws or country obligations under relevant international treaties and agreements” (para. 2.3.) as well as the Bank’s commitment to “the respect for human rights in the projects” it finances (para. 2.4). 4. The draft policy further preserves the current ESP’s formulation regarding the client’s human rights responsibilities within their business activities: “EBRD will require clients…to respect human rights, avoid infringement on the human rights of others, and address adverse human rights risks and impacts” caused by their business activities (ibidem).