These essays, with one exception originally published in Philosophy & Public Affairs, consider the moral problems associated with improving the social and economic position of disadvantaged groups. If the situation of women and minorities improves so that their opportunities are equal to those of more favored groups, will they then be in a competitive position conducive to equal achievement? If not, can preferential hiring or preferential admission to educational institutions be justified? The contributors explore the complexities of this problem from several points of view.

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Just as there are rational requirements on thought, there are rational requirements on action. This book defends a conception of ethics, and a related conception of human nature, according to which altruism is included among the basic rational requirements on desire and action.

Thomas Nagel is widely recognized as one of the top American philosophers working today. Reflecting the diversity of his many philosophical preoccupations, this volume is a collection of his most recent critical essays and reviews.
The first section, Public and Private, focuses on the notion of privacy in the context of social and political issues, such as the impeachment of President Clinton. The second section, Right and Wrong, discusses moral, political and legal theory, and includes pieces on John Rawls, G.A. Cohen, and T.M. Scanlon, among others. The final section, Mind and Reality,...

John Rawls hat sich in keinem seiner publizierten Werke systematisch mit Fragen der Religion auseinandergesetzt und auch darüber, wie er es persönlich mit dem Glauben hält, stets Diskretion bewahrt. Wenig überraschend also, daß der Autor der Theorie der Gerechtigkeit zeitlebens als "religiös unmusikalisch" galt. Nach Rawls' Tod wurden jedoch zwei Texte entdeckt, die zu einer gründlichen Revision dieses Bildes zwingen: seine "Senior Thesis", 1942 eingereicht an der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Princeton, sowie ein kurzer, sehr persönlicher Text aus den neunziger Jahren....

This introduction to geothermal modeling deals with flow and heat transport processes in porous and fractured media related to geothermal energy applications. Following background coverage of geothermal resources and utilization in several countries, the basics of continuum mechanics for heat transport processes, as well as numerical methods for solving underlying governing equations are discussed. This examination forms the theoretical basis for five included step-by-step OpenGeoSys exercises, highlighting the most important computational areas within geothermal resource utilization,...