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When there is scarcity of educational position, we need a just system of distribution that decides who's to be admitted to said position. In this text I argue that the common system of using grades and test results as merit to distribute educational opportunities is unjust. The reason being that we simply cannot assign grades that are neither fully reliable or valid. I describe a generalized education system that we have today distributing educational opportunities. The system is characterized by having a compulsory basic education that distributes its educational opportunities strictly egalitarian. Later introducing grades and standardized tests to progress into higher education creating a meritocratic distribution. Furthermore I introduce Nozickian libertarianism and a version of Rawls distributional principles including affirmative action policies. All of which have their merits and drawbacks, which is why I lastly put forth my own proposed approach. The proposal consists of the fundamental right that every person with the adequate knowledge and skills to succeed in referred education is entitled to it. The building blocks for this education system and its distribution of educational opportunities is compulsory basic education, specialized admission tests and lottery accompanied by a queue system.

The pursuit of sustainability of governance and development has become a major challenge in contemporary times because of increasing realization that: various ecological and social systems are interconnected; and the complexity of our natural and constructed environs requires holistic approaches to avoid catastrophic fissures in the systems on which humans depend. As regional governments such as the East African Community (EAC) become important in Africa (and other regions), they present opportunities to generate cross-national approaches to achieving sustainability albeit success in that direction is limited and sporadic. In order to mitigate the underlying causes of that situation, we need to reconceptualize and reconstruct sustainability thinking and policy. From an applied ethics perspective, the study set out to explicate the value of and constructively generate a more viable conceptualization of sustainability in relation to the EAC. The study used qualitative methodology; designed as an atypical regionalization case-study and an analytical-constructive research; compatible research tools were employed in interrogating and analyzing secondary sources relating to member states of the EAC and the research was executed between 2011 and 2014. The research found a divergence between the two main conceptual approaches to sustainability in Africa, namely, the ‘Market inspired sustainability’ (MIS) logic and the ‘Traditional African sustainability’ (TAS) logic. The study also uncovered colonial Social Darwinism as a major underlying governance philosophy that motivated the EAC’s former colonial rulers; which became a key ingredient in the application of a colonial-functionalist approach to the region’s earlier integration project (EAC-1).This was traced as a major premise on which the unsustainabilities within the contemporary regionalization project (EAC-2) were crafted. The research also found some acceptable levels of competence in regional governance within the individual EAC member countries in terms of: i) hierarchical, ii) network, and iii) market styles of metagovernance. However, closer analysis revealed: i) an inverse relationship between transfer of capabilities from colonizers to natives (TCCN) and the sustainability of postindependence states (SPIS); and ii)a directly proportional relationship between colonial governance style (CGS) and the economic performance of post-colonial (EPPC) East African countries. It also revealed an ambitious but inadequately grounded drive to expand the EAC project without due attention being given to existing faultlines of possible disintegration such as: perpetuation of colonially-initiated injustices, citizens’ incapacity to partake of the benefits of the integration, and low levels of integrity, among others. The EAC faces a risk of turning into colonial victimization and villainization writ large; which is unsustainable due to the social laws of victim-disaffection (ViD) and villain-encumbrance (ViE). Further analysis showed that these faultlines of disintegration could be exasperated internally by the governance styles and stances taken by the ruling regimes of the core member states: Kenya’s Jubilee Alliance Party (JAP) has to balance between the forces of ethnically inspired devolution and multicultural capitalism; Tanzania’s Chama Cha Mapimduzi (CCM) still has to overcome a socialist single-party hangover and manage the political marriage between the mainland and the island; and Uganda’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) has chosen a governance philosophy of hybrid Marxism. From a justice point of view, the study advocates for establishing a Regional Basic Structure (RBS) that uses a ‘one-step original position’ as a mitigation measure. The RBS should befounded on universal egalitarianism so as to minimize misrepresentation and diminish the political elitist culture of betrayal of the electorate at all levels of representative leadership. In a reconstructive fashion, the research amplified the classical philosophical position that ethical values within society (the ethical fabric) provide the foundation on which other dimensions of sustainability are built. On the basis of that premise, the study generated and proposes the Comprehensive Ethical Sustainability (CES) frameworkas a scheme of axiomized ethical principles designed to be used towards the realization of the sustainability of systems and processes. The CES scheme is a principlistic recasting of selected intuitively valuable dominant approaches to development; designed to be convertible into a comprehensive program of action (or sets of regional policies) towards the attainment of governance and development sustainability in an integrated EAC. The CES framework is fashioned as a reorganized, multi-dimensional cocktail of i) compound, ii) compatible and iii) complimentary principles of: i) Justice, ii) Capabilities, iii) Ubuntu and iv) Integrity, whose application would make the regional bloc sustainable. These principles are considered and proposed as pillars in the: i) theorization of sustainability; and ii) policy formulation, structural arrangements and individual action aimed at sustainability.

In this paper, I plan to explore whether giving gifts, inheritance, or charity can be justified using the concept of self-ownership. I will be using Robert Nozick's principle of justice in transfer in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia as my foundation, and I will determine whether gifts – as a form of transfer – are compatible with this principle. The main argument will be that gifts are not compatible with Nozick's principle of justice in transfer because they cannot be justified using the principle of self-ownership. The point of this argument against gifting is to show that Nozick's principle of justice in transfer is incomplete. Not all transfer can be justified using self-ownership, and thus we need another principle along with it. It is essentially an argument ad absurdum. If we show that gifting cannot be justified, the only choice is to create a system that does not include gifts, charity, or inheritance. But, as I will discuss in the conclusion, such a system would be intuitively incorrect, and would lead to ridiculous practical consequences. Thus, I aim to show that self-ownership cannot do all of the work in Nozick's theory – he must add another principle that can account for gifting. In the first chapter, I will outline the arguments for the principle of self-ownership, and how these arguments lead to property ownership. I will also describe what it means to own property, or to have a right to property. In the second chapter, I will examine the principle of justice in transfer and the free market, and some of the objections to them. The third chapter deals with the argument specifically against gifting, and the fourth chapter shows how the arguments against gifting do not extend to market transfer. In the fifth chapter, I will describe and refute some possible objections to the idea that gifting cannot be justified using self-ownership within the principle of justice in transfer. In the conclusion, I will look at some of the practical consequences that show us why a system without gifting would be absurd.

A great fire seized a suburb in a small town in Sweden in the autumn of 2011. Parts of a shopping mall were burnt to the ground by youngsters. Due to the suburb's earlier problems, the event was a tough ethical dilemma for the town's journalists. The purpose of this thesis was to study and examine the local newspapers ethical treatment of this event. How do they motivate their decisions on what to publish and what not to publish? How do the articles treat ethical dilemmas? What do the journalists think about ethical journalism? This study is based on a survey of the articles published about the fire in the two local newspapers seven days after the fire. We chose 16 articles for a critical qualitative discourse analysis and we interviewed 4 of the journalists who wrote articles about the fire. The study shows that the newspapers in some ways may have contributed to a polarization of people, a so-called “us and them” scenario.

Diss. Linköping : Univ., 1998.

Diss. Uppsala : Uppsala universitet, 2006.

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No description available.

No description available.