Article

The Virtues of Limits

May 2023
The Philosophical Quarterly 73(3)

DOI:10.1093/pq/pqad050

Authors:

Some virtues are chiefly about increasing one's domain, striking out into the unknown, and bursting the bounds that confine us. Other virtues are about accepting limits and thriving within them. David McPherson's worthwhile book is an extended exploration of the latter, with an emphasis on reverence, humility, gratitude, contentment, moderation, loyalty, and neighbourliness. Appealing to these ‘limiting virtues’, as he calls them, McPherson defends a panoply of normative conclusions in ethics, politics, and economics. For instance, by appealing to reverence, he argues there are absolute prohibitions we must respect no matter the stakes; by appealing to humility, that utopian ambitions in the political sphere are unacceptable; by appealing to patriotism, that it is better to be a citizen of a particular somewhere rather than a citizen of the world; and by appealing to gratitude, that all of us, regardless of religion, should embrace something like the Jewish practice of Sabbath.

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.

Article

Full-text available

Virtues and limits of competitive funds to finance research and innovation: The case of Mexican agri...

August 2008 · Science and Public Policy

Competitive funds (CF) have become a preferred mechanism to allocate research funding, particularly in developing countries, to the point that they are the most important (and often unique) source of funds. Most analysis of CF assumes that they are an efficient instrument to allocate research funds, without realizing that other allocation mechanisms are available. The funding agency only has ... [Show full abstract] limited knowledge about the effectiveness of CF. This paper reviews the experience of the Mexican Produce Foundations with CF in the agriculture sector and discusses some benefits and limits of using CF as the main mechanism to fund research in a country with a relatively weak national innovation system, a relatively small research system, and some very innovative actors in the agricultural system. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Article

Full-text available

Bistable systems with Stochastic Noise: Virtues and Limits of effective Langevin equations for the T...

September 2011

The understanding of the statistical properties and of the dynamics of multistable systems is gaining more and more importance in a vast variety of scientific fields. This is especially relevant for the investigation of the tipping points of complex systems. Sometimes, in order to understand the time series of given observables exhibiting bimodal distributions, simple one-dimensional Langevin ... [Show full abstract] models are fitted to reproduce the observed statistical properties, and used to investing-ate the projected dynamics of the observable. This is of great relevance for studying potential catastrophic changes in the properties of the underlying system or resonant behaviours like those related to stochastic resonance-like mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a framework for encasing this kind of studies and show, using simple box models of the oceanic circulation and choosing as observable the strength of the thermohaline circulation. We study the statistical properties of the transitions between the two modes of operation of the thermohaline circulation under symmetric boundary forcing and test their agreement with simplified one-dimensional phenomenological theories. We extend our analysis to include stochastic resonance-like amplification processes. We conclude that fitted one-dimensional Langevin models, when closely scrutinised, may result to be more ad-hoc than they seem, lacking robustness and/or well-posedness. They should be treated with care, more as an empiric descriptive tool than as methodology with predictive power.

Article

Virtues, limits and prospects of the national accounts

January 2017

The most important issues that national accounts have to solve today are the changes brought about by the globalization and the activity of multinational corporations on economic life. In June 2017, the 16th Conference of the Association de Comptabilité Nationale was held in Paris to talk over these topical issues. The paper presents the most important discussion topics raised at the conference ... [Show full abstract] and reflects their importance for the further development of national accounts.

Book

Japan, the Sustainable Society: The Artisanal Ethos, Ordinary Virtues, and Everyday Life in the Age...

December 2021

[...]
John Lie

Last Updated: 13 Jun 2023