...the origin of ethics (supposedly defining ethics as out of contractual motives, i.e. compromise between doing and suffering from injustice) tells us nothing about where it will end...
...the ultimate reason for entering into the ethical contract is...self-interest...(which is not economic-theoretically impossible but philosophically not appealing, since ethics as a philosophy is more unifying than exploratory as is specialized by sciences like economics)
How to spot a murderer's brain, The Guardian: In 1987, Adrian Raine, who describes himself as a neurocriminologist, moved from Britain to the US. His emigration was prompted by two things. The first was a sense of banging his head against a wall. Raine, who grew up in Darlington and is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was a researcher of the biological basis for criminal behaviour, which, with its echoes of Nazi eugenics, was perhaps the most taboo of all academic disciplines.Murderers are genetically different from non-murderers. If taking this as no less scientific than the genetic difference between humans and cows, Peter Singer could have another chapter in his book of Practical Ethics on the equal rights of murderers. And perhaps another appendix On Being Silenced in Germany, for his Nazi-eugenicist ideals.
In Britain, the causes of crime were allowed to be exclusively social and environmental, the result of disturbed or impoverished nurture, rather than fated and genetic nature. To suggest otherwise, as Raine felt compelled to, having studied under Richard Dawkins and been persuaded of the "all-embracing influence of evolution on behaviour", was to doom yourself to an absence of funding. In America, there seemed more open-mindedness on the question and, as a result, more money to explore it. There was also another good reason why Raine headed initially to California: there were more murderers to study than there were at home...
(Ch3)...philosophers have advocated equal considerations of interests...only a few have recognized...applications beyond our own species...one of the few being Jeremy Bentham...the founding father of modern utilitarianism...
(Ch1)...it differs from classical utilitarianism...in that 'best consequences' is understood as meaning what...furthers the interests of those affected (individual preferences incorporated)...rather than merely what increases pleasure and reduces pain...
...the replacement of physical capital accumulation by human capital accumulation as the prime engine of economic growth has changed the qualitative impact of inequality on the process of development...
...inequality in the ownership of factors of production has generated an incentive for the better-endowed agents to block the implementation of institutional changes and policies that promote human capital accumulation...
