Bart Engelen

In this paper, we want to analyze conceptually whether and when merely using economic discourse – talking money – can crowd out people's positive attitudes towards environmental goods and their reasons to protect them. We concentrate on the specific case of market-based or monetary valuation as an instance of ‘commodification in discourse’ and argue that it can have the same moral problems as real commodification. We aim to bring together insights from philosophy, ethics, economics and psychology to argue that there are good reasons to think about how and when to apply MV in environmental cases. On the basis of this interdisciplinary analysis and in order to promote further empirical research, we develop four empirically falsifiable hypotheses. Commodification in discourse can bring about real commodification. MV can have framing and crowding effects on those who come into contact with it. Intrinsic motivation is more robust than extrinsic motivation and leads less to freeriding. MV's framing and crowding effects can decrease environmental protection.

This article focuses on the explanations of human cooperation that dominate the fields of psychology, philosophy, economics and other social sciences. It argues that these accounts all frame cooperation in egoistic terms and thus cannot solve the evolutionary puzzle of strong reciprocity, defined as a propensity to cooperate with others similarly disposed and to punish others who violate norms, even at a personal cost and without any prospect of present or future rewards. This article shows that strong reciprocity accounts for the uniquely high levels of human cooperation and is best explained by referring to the important role of culture in natural selection. In the end, it aims to analyze the implications of these insights for the interdisciplinary aim of understanding the sources of cooperation.

This chapter goes into crucial questions related to the impact of technology on our privacy, our personal identity and our social relationships. While technology often seems extremely convenient in helping us remember things and share our experiences with others, this episode shows that it can have highly undesirable side‐effects as well. Technologies like the grain put inevitable pressures not only on privacy and trust but also on our ability to create and tell our life stories. In this chapter, we show how getting to know each other's entire history and achieving full transparency about ourselves and others will likely destroy crucial and valuable aspects of our social lives.

In the previous issue of Ethical Perspectives David Heyd defends the permissibility of sex selection for non-medical reasons. He tries to show that there is nothing inherently wrong with this practice and that allowing it does not lead to undesirable consequences. There are several difficulties with his analysis, but the main objection is that it ultimately relies on a crude form of utilitarianism. Along with some critical comments on his article, we provide ethical arguments in support of the intuitive condemnation of sex selection for non-medical reasons

In Magnolia, a 1999 movie written and directed by then 29-year-old Paul Thomas Anderson, we follow a range of characters who all try to come to terms with the things happening to them in both the present and past. This chapter interprets the movie as making a philosophical point about meaning: how and why do people find meaning in and attribute meaning to things, even if they seem to happen for no apparent reason at all? We will analyze how both the movie’s characters and all of us watching the movie, living our own lives, try to make sense of the often absurd coincidences in life. More importantly, we will ask why we feel the need to “make sense” of the things that happen to and around us and what happens when our attempts fail. How should we respond to things that simply don’t make sense, even after we have tried hard? The chapter explains how (key scenes of) the movie can be interpreted as visualizing the philosophical notion of “the absurd” and inviting us to respond to absurdities in ways already articulated by the French existentialist Albert Camus.