Responsibility for the world

What the world inhabited by citizens is like is an important influence on whether citizens are independent practical reasoners and are able and willing to discharge their responsibilities for the world. To have political power, and therefore the ability to change the world, citizens must be able to act together. This is more likely in a world built so that people have to meet and interact with each other than in one where it is possible for the individual to be isolated from others. As I will explain in the next chapter, power is a precondition of responsibility if citizens feel that they have no power to change the world, they will not feel that they have any responsibility for it. 

A sense of responsibility for the world is one of the most important of the virtues of citizenship that, along with concern for the world, have traditionally been emphasized by republicanism. In the following chapter I examine this virtue, along with other meanings that responsibility can have. I also look at how decisions about technology are made, by government and by individuals. To what extent are they responsible decisions, informed by a sense of responsibility for the world ... 

Our current situation is one in which government does not take responsibility for the world, so does not restrict the choices that individuals have to what is in the interests of that world. Simone Weil said that in this situation, where the rules that govern our life together allow choices that injure the common interest, people ... 

By the nfid 1900s these three processes were responsible for the world s entire production of flat glass, with 12% being made by the Fourcault process, 20% by the Colburn-Libbey-Owens process, and 8% by the Pittsburgh process. These processes have now been replaced almost entirely by the float process. 

The generation of plastics waste has been stimulated by increased production coupled with an increasing population, and it is responsible for the world s present environmental crisis. The rapidly increasing demand and production of plastics has led to increased pollution and the replacement of many non-plastic items in the market place. 

Although the honey bee s sting is unpleasant, this tiny creature is crucial to the world s agricultural economy. Honey bees produce more than jjilOO million worth of honey each year, and, more importantly, the pollination of numerous plants by honey bees is responsible for the production of i20 billion worth of crops in the United States alone. 

The excellent resistance of zinc to corrosion under natural conditions is largely responsible for the many and varied applications of the metal. In fact nearly half the world consumption of zinc is in the form of coatings for the prevention of corrosion of steel fabrications exposed to the atmosphere and to water. For its varied applications zinc is obtainable in a number of grades. Ordinary commercial (G.O.B.) zinc contains up to about I -5% total of lead, cadmium and iron. Electrolytic zinc has a minimum zinc content of 99-95% and contains small amounts of the same impurities. Special high-purity zinc has a minimum of 99-99% zinc. Even purer zincs are commercially available. 

Examine the page before you Not the words, but the material itself, paper. We often take this product for granted, but paper-making is one of the most important developments in the advance of civilization. According to legend, the first sheets of paper were made from mulberry leaves in China in AD 105. For many centuries paper was made in individual sheets, so it was a rare and expensive commodity. Paper-making machines were first developed in the early years of the nineteenth century. The development of machinery that allowed high-speed paper production was partially responsible for the increase in literacy and education of people around the world. 

The Cr/Si02 Phillips catalysts, patented in 1958 by Hogan and Banks [2], are nowadays responsible for the commercial production of more than one third of all the polyethylene sold world-wide [7,16]. 

The hepatitis C virus (HCV) is responsible for a world-wide epidemic with approximately 170 million people infected. It was identified only in the 1980s and since that time great efforts have been made in the search for treatments. Genetic analysis of the virus revealed coding for a serine protease (NS3) and the first clinical studies on inhibitors of the protease have recently been carried out. Chapter 2 presents a review of the medicinal chemistry approaches to this target. 

The potential of NSR catalysts in the removal of NO from mobile sources has motivated in the last few years extensive investigations from both the academic and the industrial world, and several studies have been published in the open literature dealing with fundamental and practical aspects of LNT catalysts [4-53], However, the mechanisms that operate the NO adsorption and the respective subsequent reduction have not been completely clarified so far. It has been shown that under oxidizing conditions, NO are stored on the surface of a Ba-containing catalyst in various forms (surface nitrites/nitrates), whose precise nature is, however, still a matter of debate [9-29], Even less clear are the mechanisms, which are responsible for the reduction of stored NO when the A/F ratio is set to rich and the stored NO species are reduced over Pt to N2, ammonia, N20 or back to NO [11],... 

Our results suggest that forest degradation is detectable not only in Yungas but also in Chaco. In environments similar to Chaco, discrepancies between these results (lower) and estimations made in similar environments in other forests of the world might be due to structural differences, altitude, latitude and humidity, gradients (24, 32, 33). However, in our case the level of degradation exerted by human activity in this environment might also be responsible for the discrepancies [20, 21, 41] (further details refer to [43]). 

---