This short chapter discusses the impact of lab-grown diamonds on the traditional diamond industry and the value of a diamond and uses it as an allegory for AI’s potential impact on intellectual property. Additionally, the chapter touches upon consumer preferences and the growing trend towards alternative gemstones, as well as the implications for the future of the diamond industry, again drawing parallels to the IP system.

This paper examines what Kant says about the economy in Feyerabend’s notes of Kant’s lectures on natural right. While Feyerabend does not report Kant having a systematic discussion of the economy as a topic in its own right the text is interesting in what it shows about the context and the development of Kant’s thought on issues to do with political economy. I look at the Feyerabend lecture notes in relation to things said about the economy in Achenwall’s Natural Law, Kant’s text book, as well as in Kant’s Doctrine of Right. Looking at the three texts in relation to each other illuminates the development of Kant’s thinking and the paper focuses on tracing the relations between ideas to do with the economy in the three texts. I look at Kant’s developing thoughts on the economy in relation to the following ideas: an account of money; an account of value and price; the theorization of labor; taxation; property and the commons.

The human being is freely ‘self-determined’ rather than determined through some external authority (whether theological or teleological). This dichotomy conveniently expresses the usual understanding of modern political thought’s divergence from preceding tradition. By comparison, pre-modernity is teleological, anthropomorphic, realist; in a word, naïve – with its substantively rational nature, dictating essential ends to which we are subject. These received truths are past due for a re-examination. Just how naïve or dogmatic was the Greek understanding of freedom and nature? In this chapter, I argue that Plato’s view of man as naturally political is more complex and multivalent than our historical categorizations allow. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which, for him, politics does indeed depend upon a natural model. That model, however, is the Idea of the Good. And here, where Plato seems furthest from us, lies his greatest challenge to contemporary understandings of nature and freedom.

The main focus of this chapter is on another class of actions (in addition to the habits discussed in Chapter 2) that don’t result from decision-making processes. So in that sense they aren’t intentional and don’t fit the standard belief-desire model. These are actions that are directly caused by affective states (emotions, desires, and so on). Some of these actions are merely expressive, whereas others give the appearance of being instrumental, and are generally (but mistakenly) interpreted as goal-directed. But the chapter begins with a review of some basic findings from affective science and neuroscience. This is to set up the discussion in this and later chapters.

This chapter assesses what role businesses need to play in the transisiton to a sustainable future. It details the corporate attempts to debunk climate science and the ever-sophisticated art of greenwash. By exploring examples of both, the reader is enabled to think more critically about the role of business in society. It also looks at corruption and cover-ups and how neither have a place in an Anthropocene-fit business or industry. Finally, it gives examples of companies who are showing an ethical and sustainable way forward for the future.

The previous chapter summarized the first three pathways: avoidance, conformance, and prevention. These pathways represent conventional and widely used applications of legal knowledge. This chapter continues the presentation of the five pathways of legal strategy by introducing the remaining two pathways: value and transformation. The value pathway focuses on using legal knowledge as a source of value creation and capture. The transformation pathway perceives legal knowledge as a strategic asset, and uses that knowledge to reshape the market or the organization. These remaining two pathways are distinct because they enable acquisition of a competitive advantage, and in some cases a sustainable competitive advantage, in a fashion that most firms do not generally pursue.

This chapter of the handbook introduces some core elements of moral decision making by framing it from one particular perspective: expected utility theory. In its classic form, expected utility theory focuses on the outcomes of actions: the expected utility of a decision is the sum of the values associated with the different possible outcomes of the decision weighted by the probability of their occurrence. As such, expected utility theory is well suited to explain the moral choices recommended by utilitarianism, which characterizes right actions in terms of the maximization of aggregate utility. As the authors point out, however, expected utility theory can be also used to model nonutilitarian decision making by assigning utilities to actions themselves, not just their outcomes. This action-based form of expected utility theory can readily accommodate the fact that people tend to assign low utility to actions that violate moral norms. Further, action-based expected utility theory can explain a wide range of phenomena revealed by empirical research on moral decision making, such as interpersonal disagreement about fairness, in-group bias, and outcome neglect.

Worship is typically understood as an act of religious reverence and devotion to a deity, usually involving some ritual. I aim here to explore whether, and how far, we might make sense of the idea of worship even on robust atheistic assumptions, according to which there is good reason to believe that there is no deity, nor supernatural beings of any kind, so that the only live beings in the world are humans, animals, plants and the like. We shall call this Atheist Worship (AW). Beyond that, I wish to explore the possible value of such practice. If there is no God, then in some sense AW is normatively the only possible form of worship that is not based on error or pretence. But as we shall see, there is no reason why theists cannot also engage in many forms of “AW” (in the sense of engaging in practices expressing attitudes of reverence and devotion towards something held to be of great value and importance, without theistic assumptions), so the value of this project does not depend upon atheism.

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land participates in the historical process of finance capital by developing a semiotics for a new form of value: affective intensity. This chapter argues that The Waste Land is mimetic of affect insofar as the effect of reading The Waste Land is a constantly shifting landscape of affective intensities that refuse narrative containment and prevent the emotional complacency that was the source of social stability in the world of industrial capital and the value form of character. The poem thereby functions as a kind of training ground for an emerging corporate capitalism that orients consumers around the affective intensities of constant novelty through branding and rebranding campaigns as well as the volatile ups and downs of a financialized economy whose health is measured by corporate stock indexes rather than the productivity of labor.

This chapter explores the notion of ‘family’ from a philosophical perspective. EU family law recognises that there is such a thing as the family and that it merits special legal protection. Yet, different societies define what counts as a family, and its members, in different ways. The changes in family forms over the last hundred years have also led some to argue that ‘the family’ no longer exists, and, moreover, that it is not special. These arguments are criticised. It is argued that there can be a single concept of ‘the family’ under which different instances fall. The chapter also argues that giving a special legal status to the family requires being able satisfactorily to define what it is and offers a defence of a ‘functional’ definition. It then considers ways in which the family - as defined - might be thought uniquely valuable, critically reviewing appeals to the goods it provides and emphasising the key public good of families in rearing children. The probable impossibility of unifying EU family law does not mean that it is inconsistent to argue that a single concept of family encompasses many different national forms and that the family, in its diversity, continues to merit a special legal status.

This chapter explores how taxing the traditional livelihood practice of distilling spirits transformed the status of work and traditions, making previously ordinary ways of life illegal, and leading families to weigh their business self-interest against relationships, legal and moral responsibilities, and values. The chapter elucidates the opaque qualities of Istria’s vibrant moonshine market by unpacking the values underpinning it and the relationships between the winemakers, craft distillers, and bootleggers of which it is constituted. Taxing and regulating spirits challenged societal values in ways that forced new considerations into long-standing relationships, particularly around the circulation of the biowaste necessary for distilling. Families sought to maintain livelihoods based on farming, winemaking, and distilling while navigating new regulatory regimes, but those who could not handle such changes retreated from formal business ownership and into the margins of the market. This shift demonstrated that tax can make and unmake markets in sometimes unintended ways. At its core, this chapter illuminates how values in Istrian culture intersect in the practice of distilling and are complicated by the introduction of taxes and regulations.

Drawing on Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, the introduction develops a theory of finance capital as a complex historical process, which, during the modernist period, involved the economic and cultural turn toward London, the rise of the modern corporation, the growth of the professional classes, and the emergence of affect as value form. The introduction differentiates this definition of finance capital from those definitions that inform the field of critical financial studies, and it surveys economic criticism in modernist studies to demonstrate the minimal attention paid to finance capital in the field despite the fact that the period corresponds to an era of rapid and widespread financialization. The introduction argues that the crisis in representation often identified with modernism participates in a historical moment of financial crisis as artists and intellectuals account for the emergence of new value forms like speculation, volatility, risk, and affect.

Via an analysis of H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay, this chapter explores how novels adapted to accommodate the metropolitan spaces of London, and it argues that Wells’s novel links the financialization of the British economy and the cultural turn toward London to the emergence of a new novelistic poetics and to the development of a new novelistic character. Tono-Bungay narrates the rise and fall of Teddy Ponderevo’s financial empire, but the source of drama in the novel is more often the narrator’s inability to reconcile classical novelistic poetics with the logic of value production under finance capitalism and with his experiences in London. The narrator longs for a new mode of representation that can account for the largely imaginary and highly volatile value produced by the financial empire, and he finds inspiration for that new mode of representation in the urban spaces of London.

This chapter argues that Imagist poetry participates in the historical process of finance capital by developing the semiotics for a new form of value: affective intensity. Pound’s and H. D.’s Imagist poetry renders the raw moment of impact between bodies, which provides the foundation for affective experience, as an object of poetic study, literary representation, and semiotic problem to be solved. Therefore, Imagism, along with philosophical and commercial endeavors during this time period, lays the groundwork for affect to emerge as a value form in literature and as a site of social, economic, and cultural struggle under twentieth-century capitalist structures of power.

The conclusion applies the semiotics of affect imagined by Imagism and The Waste Land to several of the novels from the earlier parts of the book, including The Moonstone, A Study in Scarlet, The Waves, and Voyage in the Dark. The conclusion argues that in late Victorian novels affective expressions are incorporated into a novelistic poetics of character, while in the proto-modernist and modernist novels affective expression becomes an object of literary conjecture, a vector of critique, and a source of literary and economic value.