Peaceful Desires

Justice and Peaceful Cooperation

Justice is important, but so is peaceful cooperation. In this article, I argue that if one takes seriously the autonomy of individuals and groups and the fact of moral pluralism, a just system of cooperation cannot guarantee peaceful cooperation in a pluralistic world. As a response to this consideration, I develop a contractarian theory that can secure peaceful cooperation in a pluralistic wor...

Peaceful collaborations deserve support.

THE FORMER RAND AFRIKAANS UNIVERSITY, now University of Johannesburg, has acted against its own and the South African national interest by terminating the 25-year-old collaboration with the Ben Gurion University of the Negev (Around the World item “End to partnership with Israeli university,” News of the Week, 1 April, p. 19). Boycotts of Israeli scientists, science institutions, and worse, res...

Creating Peaceful Classrooms

EEPING schools safe while preserving productive learning environments is an increasing concern for educators everywhere. Teachers and administrators are seeking strategies that will help students learn to act respectfully and responsibly. Researchers who are also teachers, administrators, and specialists in Michigan, Minnesota, and Oregon are documenting how the constitutional language of right...

Realistic desires

Realism for agents with unconditional beliefs, desires and intentions (BDI agents) has been analyzed in modal logic. This paper provides a logical analysis of realism for agents with conditional beliefs and desires in a rule based approach analogous to Reiter’s default logic. We distinguish two types of realism, which we call ‘a priori’ and ‘a posteriori’ realism. We analyze whether these two n...

Dynamic Desires