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A fundamentally important question for practical reasoning is how best to understand the goodness of outcomes and the nature of moral ideals: Is the Internal Aspects View correct, is the Essentially Comparative View correct, or is, perhaps, some other view correct? This chapter distinguishes between the Internal Aspects View and the Essentially Comparative View, and illustrates some of the implications of adopting one or the other. In doing this, it begins by exploring an important example that illuminates the appeal of the Essentially Comparative View, Derek Parfit's Mere Addition Paradox. Analyzing the Mere Addition Paradox, its implications, and various possible responses to it provides a much better understanding of a number of important views that stand or fall together. One of these views, called the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives Principle, is also, along with the transitivity of “better than,” widely regarded as a fundamental principle of practical rationality.

Chapter Two looks specifically at the spatial dimensions of carceral habitus as expressed in the vision for the justice campus as well as in the growing scope of so called alternatives. First, the chapter examines some of the popular configurations of the justice campus that subsumed community welfare into carceral expansion. In this more expansive vision, community social services and the local safety net would exist on site with the jail, juvenile facility, and work release center that were the constitutive carceral institutions of the justice campus. The chapter discusses the contours of this vision of carceral welfare and then moves on to theorizing its prevalence and predominance among some of the more vocal campus supporters. The chapter then looks at some of the non-custodial alternatives that were expanding in the community at the same time, including several specialty courts. The chapter interrogates their designation as alternatives and considers the carceral logics that connected them to more overt practices of confinement.

The conclusion to Progressive Punishment expands on some of the ideas discussed by Decarcerate Monroe County during the course of my fieldwork. These alternatives are rooted in an abolitionist framework-that is, they are expressly committed to decarceration and to shrinking (and ultimately ending) our reliance on incarceration. These "nonreformist" reforms, or abolitionist alternatives, create a productive theoretical and political tension with the way expansion and reforms were often mutually constitutive in Bloomington and described in detail in Chapter 2. Based on visions of transformative justice, community accountability and decarceration, the chapter is organized around five themes of alternatives to the politics of carceral expansion: alternative conflict resolution processes, alternative decision-making processes, the decarceration of treatment, moving from abstinence to harm reduction, and abolitionist geographies.

This chapter discusses a way to conduct anthropological fieldwork and research on religious healing that involves experience. It shows how undertaking studies of religious healing using the anthropology of experience can bring about the loosening of the usual boundaries of social science. The chapter narrates experience with energy healing during the American Anthropological Association annual meetings in San Francisco, California; also a curious shamanism episode that had bearings on the primary function of shamanism; and some of the experiences of a group of healing practitioners who call themselves Alternatives. Alternatives is a group of inquiring people who explore alternative healing methods: African, Alaskan, north and south Native American, Chinese, and Philippine. In addition Alternatives include those who engage in healing via the following: nutrition, herbs, vitamins, homeopathy, exercise, laying on of hands, dreams, art therapy, music therapy, rebirthing, chiropractic, personality tests, stress management, and many other alternatives to chemical medicine.

Considers the prospects of a form of holism in the theory of choice, which holds that the value of one alternative can be affected by the mere presence of others. Argues that this position (also know as the Indifference of Independent Alternatives) is true for independent reasons, though it is also congenial to particularism. The consequence is that there is no possibility of a Full Ordering of values.

Visible material remnants of ancient cultures were, for a variety of historical reasons, not particularly abundant in the territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569-1795). The past monuments of these lands were not hewn in stone and marble but in timber, leaving behind no impressive structures to provoke the interest of subsequent generations. The dearth of material evidence did not, however, prevent generations of Polish historians and antiquarians from assigning Greco-Roman identities to local monuments. They were keen to offer tangible proof of the past glory of the land inhabited by the alleged descendants of the Sarmatians. In this paper, some of these monuments are explored, especially the Mounds of Krakus and Wanda near Cracow as well as an alleged tomb of Ovid in Vohlyna. The narratives fabricated around them as a part of the ideology of Sarmatism, a class discourse, which constructed an identity for the Polish nobility as the descendants of the ancient tribe of Sarmatians, are also examined.

This chapter looks at the politics and embodied health movement strategies of environmental justice advocates working on asthma issues: Alternatives for Community and Environment, based in the Roxbury area of Boston, and West Harlem Environmental Action, based in New York City. It demonstrates how asthma is transformed from a disease affecting an individual to a politicized collective illness experience. This approach, together with support from public health and science allies, can lead to concrete changes in health policy, especially in terms of health tracking, academic and community collaboration, and stronger air-quality regulation. Meanwhile, community-based environmental justice organizations link asthma with the social determinants of their health, such as discrimination and social inequality.

Chapter one opens with a contemporary dilemma in Ecuador: with the help of the “international community” will the nation complete the Yasuní-ITT Initiative, which would keep its “oil in the soil” to protect its biodiversity, indigenous tribes, and limit greenhouse gasses, or will it drill for petroleum and use the proceeds to further the social and economic development of its people? Through this example, the rest of the chapter develops the central concern of the book: how can states and civil society work within the constraints of the global economic structure to develop sustainably? Three possible futures for development are laid out: sustainable development, extractive development, and alternatives to development. The theoretical underpinning of the book, the treadmill of production theory, is explained with regard to the key players in the narrative: the state, nongovernmental organizations, social movement activists, and transnational organizations. The chapter concludes with an overview of the argument and the book.

The concluding chapter summarizes the changes in the Ecuadorian environmental movement from 1978-2015. The movement grew, diversified, struggled and radicalized. The state expanded its conception of development beyond economic goals to include social and environmental goals. The impetus for that shift came from social actors working within Ecuador. Lessons from Ecuador are expanded to a general discussion of how the interplay of transnational funders, civil society and states affect development paths, and specifically what Allan Schnaiberg called the nature-society dialectic. Hypotheses related to environmental sociology, transnational social movements, and the sociology of development are laid out. The book concludes that neoliberalism was not conducive to sustainability. Alternatives to neoliberal development models arose when the state was least constrained by the international political economy. Under both capitalist and socialist leadership, Ecuador struggled with the fundamental contradictions of economic growth–the central driving logic of the treadmill of production. This was evident as the trade-offs among economic growth, social justice, and environmental protection shifted throughout the four periods. Alternatives to traditional development, such as Ecuador’s plan for buen vivir, rewrite the goals for development and offer some hope for an ecological synthesis of the human-nature dynamic.

This chapter examines the limits of post-politics through a case study of CoExist. CoExist is a registered Community Interest Company based in Stokes Croft, Bristol. It was set up in August 2008 to manage spaces in which people can coexist (verb – to exist in harmony) with themselves, with each other, and with the environment. The expressed ambition is to establish CoExist specifically, and the city of Bristol more generally, as a ‘beacon of good practice’ that will enable others to emulate this grass-roots model of socio-environmental innovation. Can CoExist’s model for fostering economically and environmentally sustainable futures avoid the traps of gentrification and subsequent socio-economic displacement? Why does CoExist want to build ‘inter-institutional relationships of mutual benefit’ when we already know the problems that arise when government agencies and universities ‘partner’ with NGOs and community organisations? This chapter reviews relevant theoretical and substantive debates in an effort to analyse the new political-economic formations and processes of political re-invention ensuing after neoliberalism. It argues that claims about post-politicization risk overlooking the importance of micro-political experiments such as CoExist in the search for alternative socio-environmental futures.

This chapter explores what happens when neoliberal capitalism becomes a hegemonic system of thought and practice, with its unswerving belief in the virtues of markets and the private, of competition and inequality, and of calculation and individual choice. But it is not a general account of this phenomenon, rather a study of how it plays out in one small part of the neoliberal world – early childhood education and care (ECEC) in England. Nor is this chapter solely critique. It is also about the possibility of thinking differently and an exercise in putting the neoliberal approach to ECEC where it belongs: in perspective, as but one of a number of alternatives, a possibility rather than a necessity. In particular, the chapter explores just one of these alternatives, an ECEC inscribed with democracy as a fundamental value. It makes the case for researching critical case studies of innovative provision and practice to understand better the conditions and processes that might stimulate and sustain alternatives. The chapter concludes it is still possible to envisage a demarketised system based on Children's Centres, each serving all families in a local catchment area and each generating a wide range of projects in response to local encounters.

This chapter addresses the question of how to move beyond our national addiction to racism, arguing that public attitudes can be changed from punitive to compassionate through closer knowledge of prisoners and their experiences. As evidence of this claim, the chapter chronicles the experiences of a longtime New Jersey-based workshop leader for the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), a volunteer network that offers conflict-transformation workshops in prisons and communities. The chapter examines public discourse on prisons and detailing the intersections of crime, fear, and social inequality that reinforce the racism of the prison-industrial complex. It also sketches the parameters of an inclusive vision of community safety based not on punishment, but on ethics of nonviolence, care, and compassionate love.

In modern history, social movements change the living conditions that influence well-being. Successful movements require a shared diagnosis, vision, and strategies for the transition. Today’s capitalism that values profit and corporate well-being over human and planetary health is the problem. A world where the food, education, health care, and other basic necessities are available to all and easier to find than their health-damaging alternatives is the vision, consistent with available human knowledge but not with the current distribution of power and wealth. To forge strategies for the transition, advocates can learn from current social movements — from climate and labor to Black, women’s and global justice — that are moving in this direction. The Green New Deal, worker cooperatives, and responses to the Covid-19 pandemic show how movements can make capitalism the target of change, use health as a unifying theme, and extract strategies for change from current practice.

This chapter proposes a new solution to Derek Parfit’s Mere Addition Paradox. It argues that the paradox trades on an ambiguity about the context of choice. There is a sense in which all three intuitive judgments about Parfit’s case are true, namely as pairwise comparisons in a two-possible case, i.e. in a choice situation where the option set contains only these two outcomes. The air of paradox arises from the assumption that these pairwise judgments carry over to a three-possible case, in which all three outcomes are possible. But this, the chapter argues, is not the case. If sound, this argument shows how we can make sense of each of our pairwise intuitions in the Mere Addition Paradox, without incurring the cost of intransitivity within an option set. This solves the Mere Addition Paradox and blocks the argument toward the Repugnant Conclusion. Parfit’s case also holds a general lesson about the nature of value, but one that is less revisionary than some had thought. Correctly understood, Parfit’s Mere Addition Case challenges not the transitivity of the “better than”-relation, as Larry Temkin has argued, but instead a different, and less sacrosanct, idea, namely the so-called Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives principle. What Parfit’s puzzle teaches us is that betterness is sometimes context-dependent: the relative goodness of two outcomes can depend on whether or not a third outcome could have instead been chosen.

The past two decades have brought new pharmacotherapies as well as behavioral therapies to the field of drug-addiction treatment (Carroll & Onken, 2005; Carroll, 2005; Ling & Smith, 2002; Fiellin, Kleber, Trumble-Hejduk, McLellan, & Kosten, 2004). Despite this progress, the treatment of addiction in clinical practice often remains a matter of trial and error. Some reasons for this difficulty are as follows. First, to date, no one treatment has been found that works well for most patients; that is, patients are heterogeneous in response to any specific treatment. Second, as many authors have pointed out (McLellan, 2002; McLellan, Lewis, O’Brien, & Kleber, 2000), addiction is often a chronic condition, with symptoms waxing and waning over time. Third, relapse is common. Therefore, the clinician is faced with, first, finding a sequence of treatments that works initially to stabilize the patient and, next, deciding which types of treatments will prevent relapse in the longer term. To inform this sequential clinical decision making, adaptive treatment strategies, that is, treatment strategies shaped by individual patient characteristics or patient responses to prior treatments, have been proposed (Greenhouse, Stangl, Kupfer, & Prien, 1991; Murphy, 2003, 2005; Murphy, Lynch, Oslin, McKay, & Tenhave, 2006; Murphy, Oslin, Rush, & Zhu, 2007; Lavori & Dawson, 2000; Lavori, Dawson, & Rush, 2000; Dawson & Lavori, 2003). Here is an example of an adaptive treatment strategy for prescription opioid dependence, modeled with modifications after a trial currently in progress within the Clinical Trials Network of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (Weiss, Sharpe, & Ling, 2010). . . . Example . . . . . . First, provide all patients with a 4-week course of buprenorphine/naloxone (Bup/Nx) plus medical management (MM) plus individual drug counseling (IDC) (Fiellin, Pantalon, Schottenfeld, Gordon, & O’Connor, 1999), culminating in a taper of the Bup/Nx. If at any time during these 4 weeks the patient meets the criterion for nonresponse, a second, longer treatment with Bup/Nx (12 weeks) is provided, accompanied by MM and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). However, if the patient remains abstinent from opioid use during those 4 weeks, that is, responds to initial treatment, provide 12 additional weeks of relapse prevention therapy (RPT). . . .

Convincing scientific theories are often hard to find, especially when empirical evidence is scarce (e.g., in particle physics). Once scientists have found a theory, they often believe that there are not many distinct alternatives to it. Is this belief justified? We model how the failure to find a feasible alternative can increase the degree of belief in a scientific theory—in other words, we establish the validity of the No Alternatives Argument and the possibility of non-empirical theory confirmation from a Bayesian point of view. Then we evaluate scope and limits of this argument (e.g., by calculating the degree of confirmation it provides) and relate it to other argument forms such as Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) or “There is No Alternative” (TINA).