Interests
Chapter 2 - EGM
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Welcome to the Interests page
What matters to us?
Beauty
Aesthetic significance is intricately related to our state of understanding. Each person brings more than logic and reason to a situation. Each of us brings emotions and feelings to every situation, along with tribal allegiances and trappings, human needs and motivations—including those that we purposefully hide from others and those that we unconsciously hide from ourselves. (1)
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| (1) | John Dewey, “Qualitative Thought,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, Vol. 5: Essays 1929–1930, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), |
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Desire
- "Is" statements describe states of affairs,
- "ought" statements aren't simply descriptive of states of affairs but rather assessing them in terms of their value, even asserting that what is the case ought not to be the case.
To take actions based on desires is to act as if your life matters. The basic survival unit in natural selection is the gene, which survives by being replicated in future generations. Self-preservation is a prerequisite to an entity persisting rather than entropically falling apart. A gene's best strategy is to keep an organism intact for as long as the genes need it to get themselves replicated. So it is no wonder that a reason-giving animal—namely us—is driven by its sense that its existence and flourishing matter.
The mattering instinct is so strong in us, and our tendency to want to justify our own mattering is so persistent that it leads us to universalise what individually matters to us into dicta about what ought to matter to everybody. When you figure out what matters to you and what makes you feel like you're living a meaningful life, you universalise this. We ought to resist this tendency. (2)
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| (2) | The Mattering Instinct - A conversation with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein - Edge - 2016 |
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Affordance
Psychologist James J. Gibson introduced the term affordance way back in the seventies. The basic idea is that the perceptual systems of any organism are designed to “pick up” the information that is relevant to its survival and ignore the rest. The relevant information is about opportunities “afforded” by the furnishings of the world: holes afford hiding in, cups afford drinking out of, trees afford climbing (if you’re a child or a monkey or a bear, but not a lion or a rabbit), and so forth. Affordances make a nicely abstract category of behavioral options that can be guided by something other than blind luck—in other words, by information extracted from the world. Affordances are “what the environment offers the animal for good or ill,” according to Gibson. (3)
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| (3) | Daniel Dennet - The Edge - What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? - 2017 |
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What matters to the community
Comming soon
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What matters to the enterprise: corporate interests
Legal definition (Belgium - 2022)
- Legal doctrine and jurisprudence : The interest of a company is determined by the collective profit interest of its current and future shareholders (Hof van Cassatie 28 november 2013)
- Collective profit interest of the current shareholders
- Collective profit interest of the current and future shareholders
- Result of weighing up the interests of all actors involved in the corporate actions, or the company's interest
- Diverging interests within groups of stakeholders
- Often only perception or interpretation of interests feasible
- Risk of agency conflicts
- Recommendations
- Stakeholders' participation in decision-making
- Stakeholders' entitlement to set claims
- Transparency obligations
- Wetboek Van Vennootschappen (Belgium - Dutch)
- Artikel 1 1: Een vennootschap wordt opgericht bij een rechtshandeling door één of meer personen, vennoten genaamd, die een inbreng doen Zij heeft een vermogen en stelt zich de uitoefening van één of meer welbepaalde activiteiten tot voorwerp. Een van haar doelen is aan haar vennoten een rechtstreeks of onrechtstreeks vermogensvoordeel uit te keren of te bezorgen.
- Artikel 2 8 § 2 11: ... de precieze omschrijving van het doel of de doelen die zij nastreeft bovenop het doel om aan haar vennoten een rechtstreeks of onrechtstreeks vermogensvoordeel uit te keren of te bezorgen ...
- Collective profit interest is a mandatory goal, if no other goals are specified in the articles of association, collective profit interest is clearer than ever the only goal
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| Prof. A. François - VUB & Eubelius |
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