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Justice requires that public institutions treat each person as an equal. A complete theory of justice should provide an account of those principles which both best organize and defend our various sentiments about justice and tell us which institutional arrangements and public policies will, in a given set of circumstances, best serve to ensure that our society is or becomes a just one. In the pluralistic liberal democracies of developed western societies we all accept the notion that governments, if they are to be just governments, must not play favorites. Governments have a duty to treat each person with equal concern and respect, or as a free and equal moral person, and to organize their activities so that, so far as possible, they are neutral between various competing conceptions of how one ought to live one's life. In accepting this we all agree that political discourse is to be limited to those options which can be seriously defended from an egalitarian plateau. We reject any position which can be shown to count some for more than one, or others for less than one. This agreed upon egalitarian plateau has come to be called the neutrality principle.

In this chapter, I analyze the notion of corporate responsibility from the person-centric perspective. I offer a four-dimensional exposition in terms of which I examine the corporate moral personhood view. These four dimensions are explained and critiqued to arrive at a definition of moral responsibility and status appropriate to corporations. I suggest that a corporation cannot be construed as a person in the sense in which individuals are persons. Since a corporation cannot be an independently existing entity, it cannot have an independent moral personality of its own as individual persons have. Therefore, I argue that a reasonable construal of corporate moral personhood has to exploit a different point of view altogether. With this difference of standpoint, I develop what is called the institutional personhood view. I argue that corporations do acquire a sort of collective institutional moral personality.

Economists usually try to avoid making moral judgements, at least in their professional capacity. Positive economics is seen as a way of analysing economic problems, in as scientific a manner as is possible in human sciences. Economists are often reluctant to be prescriptive, most seeing their task as presenting information on the various options, but leaving the final choice, to the political decision taker. The view of many economists is that politicians can be held responsible for the morality of their actions when making decisions on economic matters, unlike unelected economic advisors, and therefore the latter should limit their role.

Introduction: Jürgen Habermas's Critique of the Alienation/De‐alienation Scheme Revisited

The purpose of this paper is to examine the dynamics of Malaysia's new economic model (NEM) formulated to achieve Malaysia's aspiration to become a high‐income nation by 2020. Based on that analysis, the paper seeks to identify areas of research that could profitably be pursued to further the aims and implementation of the NEM. Such identification of research areas would ensure that research and development efforts are aligned to the accomplishment of national growth objectives in tune with the nation's Vision 2020 as well as spearhead development in other developing countries that wish to emulate Malaysia's model.

The paper adopts a combination of descriptive and analytical methods. Interviews with selected high‐level officials directly involved in the formulation and implementation of the NEM and secondary data and information inform this study.

Although Malaysia has done well in socio‐economic development, it is now striving hard to get out of the middle‐income trap to become a high‐income nation by 2020. The paper identifies a scholarly research agenda that will find solutions to the many challenges that Malaysia and other developing countries confront in breaking out of the middle‐income trap.

Practitioners will obtain a better appreciation of the strategies that they have to undertake to accelerate economic growth.

The issues identified in the paper and the research agenda proposed should aid policy makers, practitioners and academics in carrying out research and development efforts that could aid developing countries formulate strategies to accelerate the development process.

The paper adds to the limited knowledge on the research that has to be conducted in effectively implementing the Malaysian NEM and accelerating the growth path of the emerging economies.

Rights constitute a familiar feature of the liberal discourse of judging. This chapter seeks to recast this discourse away from the language of rights by considering two cases where liberals often invoke it: abortion and same-sex marriage. I argue that the presence of rights in American constitutional discourse exacerbates the counter-majoritarian nature of judicial review. We do better to recast the language of judging from an emphasis on protecting rights to an emphasis on making sure that the demos acts on publicly justifiable reasons. In doing so, I proffer a novel analysis of liberal theory's extant commitment to public reason, one that conceptualizes public reason as representing the scope of state power.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

1. Reason as the Source of Knowledge For medieval men, the existence of a personal and acting God was beyond any doubt. They were convinced that God intervenes into and interferes with the course of the world. The acting of God was a main factor for the explanation of natural phenomena. But with the passing of time, the understanding of nature improved and more and more phenomena could be explained by appeal to reason only and without recourse to actions of God. It became the general opinion that natural phenomena are subject to invariable natural laws. This clear departure from the God‐related understanding of nature happened when modern philosophy emerged in the 17th and 18th century. This modern philosophy saw nature as a mechanic construction. One of the leading philosophers of that period, Rene Descartes, argued that the laws of mechanics are the laws of nature. Descartes, the founder of rationalistic philosophy, was no atheist, but when he referred to God, it was only to become sure that what is clear (and rational) is also true.

The idea of what constitutes rationality has always been central to moral philosophy as well as to modern social science and economics; regardless of the fact that its meaning has also greatly changed during the last five hundred years. While for Aristotle and his followers, full rationality implied not only effective deliberation of means towards any given end, but also that such end had to be rationally selected with the guidance of reason or “practical wisdom”, since the age of Thomas Hobbes and David Humes, the concept of rationality has been reduced to one of seeking the best means to any particular end, wise or unwise. In the process, reason was relegated to mere “reckoning”, of adding and subtracting according to arithmetic rules. The good was simply what was desired, motivated by a physiological appetite for survival or otherwise. As could have been expected, such mechanical mode of reasoning readily provided the rudiments of contemporary computational theories of action, in particular game theory (see Cudd, 1993).