Functional theories posit that emotions are elicited by particular goal-related situations that represented adaptive problems and that emotions are evolved features of coordinated responses to those situations. Yet little theory or research has addressed the evolutionary aspects of these theories. We apply five criteria that can be used to judge whether features are adaptations. There is evidence that sadness, anger, and anxiety relate to unique changes in physiology, cognition, and behavior, those changes are correlated, situations that give rise to emotions (...) are consistent, and emotions are complex. To date, there is little experimental evidence regarding whether discrete emotions resolve adaptive problems and do so relatively efficiently. Evidence supporting all criteria is required to claim that discrete emotions are evolved features. (shrink)

Boredom is a frequently experienced and unpleasant state (Bench & Lench, 2019; Danckert et al., 2018; Eastwood et al., 2012) that people are experiencing more frequently (Weybright et al., 2020). W...

Analytic processes reduce biases, but it is not known how or when these processes will be deployed. Based on an affective signal hypothesis, relatively strong affective reactions were expected to result in increased analytic processing and reduced bias in judgement. The valence and strength of affective reactions were manipulated through varying outcomes in a game or evaluative conditioning of a stimulus. Relatively strong positive or negative affective reactions resulted in less desirability bias. Bias reduction only occurred if participants had time (...) to deploy analytic processes and indicators of the degree of analytic processing (in the form of attentional control) predicted less bias. Affective processes have long been acknowledged as a source of bias, but these findings suggest affective processes are also integral to bias reduction. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Female Porngasm is More Interesting to Study than Male Porngasm Most Porn is Designed to Activate and Appeal to Men's Short‐Term Sexual Strategies Most Female Porngasms are Fake Our Study Results But Female Porn Stars Do Love the Sex! Correspondence Bias Error Management Theory Conclusions Notes.

Rare copy number variants have a prominent role in the aetiology of schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric disorders. Substantial risk for schizophrenia is conferred by large CNVs at several loci, including microdeletions at 1q21.1, 3q29, 15q13.3 and 22q11.2 and microduplication at 16p11.2. However, these CNVs collectively account for a small fraction of cases, and the relevant genes and neurobiological mechanisms are not well understood. Here we performed a large two-stage genome-wide scan of rare CNVs and report the significant association of copy (...) number gains at chromosome 7q36.3 with schizophrenia. Microduplications with variable breakpoints occurred within a 362-kilobase region and were detected in 29 of 8,290 patients versus 2 of 7,431 controls in the combined sample. All duplications overlapped or were located within 89 kilobases upstream of the vasoactive intestinal peptide receptor gene VIPR2. VIPR2 transcription and cyclic-AMP signalling were significantly increased in cultured lymphocytes from patients with microduplications of 7q36.3. These findings implicate altered vasoactive intestinal peptide signalling in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia and indicate the VPAC2 receptor as a potential target for the development of new antipsychotic drugs. © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The legacy of George W. Bush will probably be associated with the President’s infallibly certain style of visionary leadership and his specific vision of a ‘Freedom Agenda’. According to this vision, the United States must spread democracy to all people who desire liberty and vanquish those tyrants and terrorists who despise it. Freedom is universally valued, and the United States is everywhere perceived as freedom’s protector and purveyor. So, the mission of the Freedom Agenda is to guard existing freedoms as (...) well as spread the democratic political system to those countries lacking comparable freedoms. Recent analyses of the Bush Freedom Agenda examine its roots in realist foreign policy and neoconservative political thought. In this paper, I take a different approach, connecting the Freedom Agenda to the ideas of two philosophers: (i) Isaiah Berlin’s notion of positive-negative liberty and (ii) John Dewey’s concept of freedom as a function of culture. My central claim is that when compared with the ideas of Berlin and Dewey, the Freedom Agenda is a faulty construct, both conceptually and practically, for understanding America’s role in global affairs. The Freedom Agenda proves to be neither conservative nor universal. Nevertheless, it constitutes an essential element of George W. Bush’s legacy, a vision of American purpose in a threatening and divisive world. (shrink)

Did the pragmatic turn encompass the linguistic turn in the history of philosophy? Or was the linguistic turn a turn away from pragmatism? Some commentators identify the so-called “eclipse” of pragmatism by analytic philosophy, especially during the Cold War era, as a turn away from pragmatist thinking. However, the historical evidence suggests that this narrative is little more than a myth. Pragmatism persisted, transforming into a more analytic variety under the influence of Quine and Putnam and, more recently, a continental (...) version in the hands of Richard Rorty and Cornel West. In this paper, I argue that proof of the linguistic turn’s presence as a moment in a broader pragmatic turn in philosophy can be garnered from close examination of a single article, W. V. O. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” and a single issue: whether the analytic-synthetic distinction is philosophically defensible. (shrink)

Holism is the notion that all the elements in a system, whether physical, biological, social or political, are interconnected and therefore should be appreciated as a whole. Consequently, the meaning or function of the total system is irreducible to the meaning or function of one or more of the system’s constituent elements. The whole is, on the holist’s account, prior to its parts. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle captures the idea of holism in his statement that “the whole is more than (...) the sum of the parts.” The term holism was coined by South African statesman and scholar Jan Smuts. Etymologically, it comes from a Greek root meaning total, whole, entire or everything. In political thought, the idea is commonly associated with organicism, the view that the state is a living whole (the so-called “body politic”) and therefore studies of the how it functions should be treated systematically rather than piecemeal (cf. Plato, G.W.F. Hegel and Henry Maine). (shrink)

The distinctive trait of this newest addition to Joseph Margolis’ magnificent oeuvre of thirty books is its broad-ranging and highly partisan approach to evaluating contemporary trends in Western philosophy. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 addresses the trifecta of competing philosophical traditions: pragmatism, continental philosophy and analytic philosophy. Based on the book’s title, the reader can easily forecast the winner: pragmatism. Margolis directs Part 2 to the goal of reclaiming naturalism as an antidote to the ailments of (...) all three philosophical traditions. Part 3 concerns the enduring challenge that Immanuel Kant’s model of transcendental reason and G. W. F. Hegel’s subsequent critique pose to contemporary philosophy. The book’s thesis is that pragmatism has lost its distinctly American quality. In its more recent incarnations, pragmatism (or neopragmatism) has been continually cross-pollinated with elements in the continental and analytic traditions. Moreover, this open-ended capacity for hybridization is what constitutes pragmatism’s advantage. (shrink)

Attridge, Harold W I am honoured to be with you this evening for this year's Knox lecture. When Master Shane McKinlay, and Associate Dean Rosemary Canavan invited me for tonight's lecture they indicated that during these fiftieth anniversary years of the Second Vatican Council the Knox lecturers are being asked to reflect on the significance of that watershed event in the life of the Church. I shall do so this evening from both scholarly and personal vantage points, since my (...) experience as a student of scripture was shaped in fundamental ways by the spirit of Vatican II. My study of Scripture has developed in a context and among a fellowship of scholars who have pursued the vision sketched by the Council's document on divine revelation, Dei Verbum. We have also worked very much in the spirit of a subsequent document, the Pontifical Biblical Commission's paper, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church presented in 1993. I shall come back to both of those texts. But first, remember where we were fifty years ago. (shrink)

Biobanking of patient-derived materials is routine in health care, research, and public health emergencies. Ethical guidelines for biobanking address concerns including some about genetic materials, informed consent, confidentiality, regulatory environments, and standards of governance. This chapter identifies some limitations of existing guidelines that were apparent to one author during an Ebola outbreak, and specifies five ethical concerns about biobanking that warrant additional attention: misconceptions about biobanking, unknown consequences for donors, socioeconomic inequities that compound vulnerabilities, lasting and proportional benefits in North-South (...) research, and contextual challenges to disclosure and understanding. These affect patients, donors, health systems, research, and policy, and are amplified during public health emergencies. (shrink)

This essay discusses the jury 's value in American democracy by examining Alexis de Tocqueville 's analysis of the jury as a free school for the public. His account of jury socialization, which stressed lay deference to judges and trust in professional knowledge, was one side of a complex set of ideas about trust and authority in American political thought. Tocqueville 's contemporary Francis Lieber held juries to have important competencies and to be ambivalent rather than deferential regarding court professionals. (...) The nineteenth-century courtroom exhibited such ambivalence and was marked by institutional conflict involving increasing professional authority demanded by the bench and populist counter-pressures. Assessing the value of the jury today may require some of the conceptual tools Tocqueville offers, but must also renew an appreciation of the jury as a site that utilizes already existing juridical capabilities of lay people and thus re-conceive the relationship between lay people and court professionals. (shrink)

The Emerging Church is one of the more interesting new movements in the religious landscape of the United States today. The Emerging Church has come out of US Evangelicalism, which has found itself in crisis, with a diminishing number of young people remaining in the church and a general popular impression of being intolerant, judgmental, and right-wing. Many in the Emerging Church are attempting to construct a vision of Christianity that addresses these problems. However, the Emerging Church is not a (...) monolith; it includes a variety of perspectives and positions. What I will argue in this article is that there is, among several different perspectives within the movement, a critique of the US political and economic system that provides an interesting and new way of thinking about the relationship between Christianity, politics, economics, and identity that may serve to create a challenge to the hegemonic system of the United States. For the purposes of this article I use three examples to illustrate my point: Shane Claibourne’s “New Monasticism”/”red Letter Christians” movement; Brian McLaren’s recent work, Why did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha and Mohammed Cross The Road; and Peter Rollins as a self-proclaimed inheritor of the radical tradition. I will show that the Emerging Church thinkers, by challenging the theological constructions of US Evangelicalism, are likewise providing fodder, to varying degrees, for a critique of the US political and economic system. Whether this will coalesce into a real significant challenge or will ultimately be reabsorbed by the status quo and/or marginalized remains to be seen. (shrink)

Precision medicine and molecular systems medicine (MSM) are highly utilized and successful approaches to improve understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of many diseases from bench-to-bedside. Especially in the COVID-19 pandemic, molecular techniques and biotechnological innovation have proven to be of utmost importance for rapid developments in disease diagnostics and treatment, including DNA and RNA sequencing technology, treatment with drugs and natural products and vaccine development. The COVID-19 crisis, however, has also demonstrated the need for systemic thinking and transdisciplinarity and the (...) limits of MSM: the neglect of the bio-psycho-social systemic nature of humans and their context as the object of individual therapeutic and population-oriented interventions. COVID-19 illustrates how a medical problem requires a transdisciplinary approach in epidemiology, pathology, internal medicine, public health, environmental medicine, and socio-economic modeling. Regarding the need for conceptual integration of these different kinds of knowledge we suggest the application of general system theory (GST). This approach endorses an organism-centered view on health and disease, which according to Ludwig von Bertalanffy who was the founder of GST, we call Organismal Systems Medicine (OSM). We argue that systems science offers wider applications in the field of pathology and can contribute to an integrative systems medicine by (i) integration of evidence across functional and structural differentially scaled subsystems, (ii) conceptualization of complex multilevel systems, and (iii) suggesting mechanisms and non-linear relationships underlying the observed phenomena. We underline these points with a proposal on multi-level systems pathology including neurophysiology, endocrinology, immune system, genetics, and general metabolism. An integration of these areas is necessary to understand excess mortality rates and polypharmacological treatments. In the pandemic era this multi-level systems pathology is most important to assess potential vaccines, their effectiveness, short-, and long-time adverse effects. We further argue that these conceptual frameworks are not only valid in the COVID-19 era but also important to be integrated in a medicinal curriculum. (shrink)

Robust ex vivo expansion of umbilical cord blood (UCB) derived hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) should enable the widespread use of UCB as a source of cells to treat hematologic and immune diseases. Novel approaches for HSPC expansion have recently been developed, setting the stage for the production of blood stem cell derived products that fulfill our current best known criteria of clinical relevance. Translating these technologies into clinical use requires bioengineering strategies to overcome challenges of scale‐up, reproducibility, and (...) product quality assurance. Clinical‐scale implementation should also define criteria and targets for cost‐effective cell manufacturing. As production strategies become more effective, new opportunities in the therapeutic use of ex vivo expanded hematopoietic cell products will emerge. Herein we examine key technological milestones that need to be met in order to move ex vivo expanded HSPC therapies from the bench‐top to the bedside in a robust and reliable manner. (shrink)

Robust ex vivo expansion of umbilical cord blood (UCB) derived hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) should enable the widespread use of UCB as a source of cells to treat hematologic and immune diseases. Novel approaches for HSPC expansion have recently been developed, setting the stage for the production of blood stem cell derived products that fulfill our current best known criteria of clinical relevance. Translating these technologies into clinical use requires bioengineering strategies to overcome challenges of scale‐up, reproducibility, and (...) product quality assurance. Clinical‐scale implementation should also define criteria and targets for cost‐effective cell manufacturing. As production strategies become more effective, new opportunities in the therapeutic use of ex vivo expanded hematopoietic cell products will emerge. Herein we examine key technological milestones that need to be met in order to move ex vivo expanded HSPC therapies from the bench‐top to the bedside in a robust and reliable manner. (shrink)

A fundamental problem in artificial intelligence is that nobody really knows what intelligence is. The problem is especially acute when we need to consider artificial systems which are significantly different to humans. In this paper we approach this problem in the following way: we take a number of well known informal definitions of human intelligence that have been given by experts, and extract their essential features. These are then mathematically formalised to produce a general measure of intelligence for arbitrary machines. (...) We believe that this equation formally captures the concept of machine intelligence in the broadest reasonable sense. We then show how this formal definition is related to the theory of universal optimal learning agents. Finally, we survey the many other tests and definitions of intelligence that have been proposed for machines. (shrink)

At the heart of some of the most influential strands of philosophical, political, and aesthetic modernism lies the conviction that modernity is fundamentally nihilistic. This book offers a wide-ranging critical history of the concept of nihilism from its origins in French Revolutionary discourse to its place in recent theorizations of the postmodern. Key moments in that history include the concept's appropriation by political activists in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, by Nietzsche in the 1880s, by the European avant-garde and 'high' modernists in the (...) early decades of the twentieth century, by conservative revolutionaries in Germany in the interwar years, and by major theorists in the post-Holocaust period. Focusing in particular on the abiding impact of Nietzsche's claim that art is the 'only superior counterforce' to nihilism, Weller argues that an understanding of modernism (and, indeed, of postmodernism) is impossible without a reflection upon the decisive role played by the concept of nihilism therein. (shrink)

Requirements for business ethics education and organizational ethics trainings mark an important step in encouraging ethical behavior among business students and professionals. However, the lack of specificity in these guidelines as to how, what, and where business ethics should be taught has led to stark differences in approaches and content. The present effort uses meta-analytic procedures to examine the effectiveness of current approaches across organizational ethics trainings and business school courses. to provide practical suggestions for business ethics interventions and research. (...) Thus, the primary questions driving this research are as follows: what course characteristics moderate the effectiveness of ethics instruction?, and have ethics education and training efforts improved? Findings suggest that professional, focused, and workshop-based training programs are especially effective for improving business ethics. However, results also reveal considerable problems with many of the criteria used to evaluate the effectiveness of business ethics interventions. Practical suggestions for course design and evaluation in business ethics efforts are discussed along with future research needs. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship of various trait emotions to the ethical choices of 189 college students who completed a managerial decision-making task as part of an in-basket exercise in a laboratory setting. Prior research regarding emotion influences on ethical decision-making and linkages between emotions and cognition informed hypotheses about how different types of emotions impact ethical choices. Findings supported our expectations that positive and negative emotions classified as active would be more strongly related to interpersonally-directed ethical choices than to (...) organizationally-directed ones, and that passive emotions would be less related to ethical choices than active emotions. Implications for ethical decision-making research and organizational practices are discussed. (shrink)

In addiction, apparently causally significant phenomena occur at a huge number of levels; addiction is affected by biomedical, neurological, pharmacological, clinical, social, and politico-legal factors, among many others. In such a complex, multifaceted field of inquiry, it seems very unlikely that all the many layers of explanation will prove amenable to any simple or straightforward, reductive analysis; if we are to unify the many different sciences of addiction while respecting their causal autonomy, then, what we are likely to need is (...) an integrative framework. In this paper, we propose the theory of “Externalist” or “4E” – for extended, embodied, embedded, and enactive – cognition, which focuses on the empirical and conceptual centrality of the wider extra-neural environment to cognitive and mental processes, as a candidate for such a framework. We begin in Section 2 by outlining how such a perspective might apply to psychiatry more generally, before turning to some of the ways it can illuminate addiction in particular: Section 3 points to a way of dissolving the classic dichotomy between the “choice model” and “disease model” in the addiction literature; Section 4 shows how 4E concepts can clarify the interplay between the addict’s brain and her environment; and Section 5 considers how these insights help to explain the success of some recovery strategies, and may help to inform the development of new ones. (shrink)

Absolute devaluation : Friedrich Nietzsche -- Homelessness : Martin Heidegger -- Fatal positivities : Theodor Adorno -- The naive calculation of the negative : Maurice Blanchot -- Bad violence : Jacques Derrida -- The fracture : Giorgio Agamben -- Distortions, or, Nihilism against itself : Gianni Vattimo -- The denial of (Greek) thought : Alain Badiou.

The Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) is a suite of interoperable ontology modules that aims to provide coverage of all aspects of the infectious disease domain, including biomedical research, clinical care, and public health. IDO Core is designed to be a disease and pathogen neutral ontology, covering just those types of entities and relations that are relevant to infectious diseases generally. IDO Core is then extended by a collection of ontology modules focusing on specific diseases and pathogens. In this paper we (...) present applications of IDO Core within various areas of infectious disease research, together with an overview of all IDO extension ontologies and the methodology on the basis of which they are built. We also survey recent developments involving IDO, including the creation of IDO Virus; the Coronaviruses Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO); and an extension of CIDO focused on COVID-19 (IDO-CovID-19).We also discuss how these ontologies might assist in information-driven efforts to deal with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, to accelerate data discovery in the early stages of future pandemics, and to promote reproducibility of infectious disease research. (shrink)

Can mythology be a form of critical theory in the service of right? From the standpoint of an Enlightenment tradition, the answer is no. Mythology is characterised by irrationality, and works to mystify reality, whilst critical theory is set against the irrational, its entire force directed at demystifying reality. In a post-Enlightenment tradition, reason, including critical reason, may take mythological form—indeed, there is identity as much as non-identity between the two forms, a mimetic relationship in which the rational cannot be (...) freed of the mythological any more than myth can stand outside reason. However, the work of critical theory remains essentially the same. Whether in the form of rational myth or mythological reason, critical theory must remain in the service of right in the sense of ‘the true’, and thus remains an enlightenment project. In contrast, the aim of this essay is to put forward a model of critical theory that is sympathetic with mythology, not only in its form, but also in the work that it does, which is not in the service of the true but of the good. That model is Peter Fitzpatrick’s seminal work of jurisprudence, The Mythology of Modern Law. After addressing how Fitzpatrick’s Mythology is in the form of a negative mythology, the essay elaborates the critical work of such mythological critical theory. In the case of Mythology, that work involves creating the conditions for a mythological legal pluralism, through the decolonisation of law. (shrink)

This paper compares two theories and their two corresponding computational models of human moral judgment. In order to better address psychological realism and generality of theories of moral judgment, more detailed and more psychologically nuanced models are needed. In particular, a motivationally based theory of moral judgment is developed in this paper that provides a more accurate account of human moral judgment than an existing emotion-reason conflict theory. Simulations based on the theory capture and explain a range of relevant human (...) data. They account not only for the original data that were used to support the emotion–reason conflict theory, but also for a wider range of data and phenomena. (shrink)

Nihilists cannot square their position with common sense simply by paraphrasing away apparent ontological commitments in ordinary language. I argue for this claim by analogy. Paraphrase atheism says there is no God, but tries to square the truth of atheism with ordinary religious sentences by paraphrasing away apparent ontological commitments. Obviously, paraphrase does not reconcile atheism with ordinary language about God. I discuss two different reasons that paraphrase can fail and suggest that both reasons afflict paraphrase nihilism. Hence, paraphrase nihilism (...) cannot reconcile nihilism and common sense, and so nihilists must look for some other strategy that can evade the force of the Atheism Case. (shrink)

The current linkages between ethical theory and management behavior are investigated. The vignettes used in this investigation represent ethical dilemmas in the areas of coercion and control, conflict of interest, physical environment, and personal integrity. Overall, even with heightened ethical awareness the link between ethical philosophy and management behavior remains similar to that of the early 1990s. Generally, practitioners still rely heavily on the utilitarian ethical philosophy when making business decisions. However, more managers are now likely to select ethically appropriate (...) actions either because it is ethical to do so, or because the consequences or risk of not doing so are too great. This shift could positively impact the ethical climate of business decision-making. (shrink)

In February 1975, a group of leading scientists, physicians, and policymakers convened at Asilomar, California, to consider the safety of proceeding with recombinant DNA research. The excitement generated by the promise of this new technology was counterbalanced by concerns regarding dangers that might arise from it, including the potential for accidental release of genetically modified organisms into the environment. Guidelines developed at the conference to direct future research endeavors had several consequences. They permitted research to resume, bringing to an end (...) the voluntary moratorium that the National Academy of Sciences had instituted several months earlier. They also served to illustrate that the scientific community was capable of self-governance, thereby securing public trust and persuading Congress not to institute legislative restrictions. Finally, they underscored the importance of weighing unforeseen risks inherent in some research against potential benefits that may arise from these same endeavors. (shrink)

Reasoning with cases has been a primary focus of those working in AI and law who have attempted to model legal reasoning. In this paper we put forward a formal model of reasoning with cases which captures many of the insights from that previous work. We begin by stating our view of reasoning with cases as a process of constructing, evaluating and applying a theory. Central to our model is a view of the relationship between cases, rules based on cases, (...) and the social values which justify those rules. Having given our view of these relationships, we present our formal model of them, and explain how theories can be constructed, compared and evaluated. We then show how previous work can be described in terms of our model, and discuss extensions to the basic model to accommodate particular features of previous work. We conclude by identifying some directions for future work. (shrink)

There exists a large body of work examining individual differences in the propensity to engage in reflective thinking processes. However, there is a distinct lack of empirical research examining th...

Scholars have typically regarded Confucius as an ethical thinker broadly construed and not as an epistemological thinker. This chapter seeks to overturn that view and, in doing so, has three basic goals. The first goal is to make the case that Confucian thought is of epistemological significance. Goal two is to locate the significance of Confucian thought within epistemology while accounting for the past overlooking of this significance. The third goal is to show that Confucian thought is not only of (...) epistemological significance, but that it can make a contribution to progressing contemporary epistemology. (shrink)

"Lesbian feminism began and has fueled itself with the rejection of liberalism.... In this rejection, lesbian feminists were not alone. They were joined by the New Left, by many blacks in the civil rights movement, by male academic theorists.... What all these groups shared was an intense awareness of the ways in which liberalism fails to account for the social reality of the world, through a reliance upon law and legal structure to define membership, through individualism, through its basis in (...) a particular conception of rationality." In tracing how lesbian feminism came to be defined in uneasy relationships with the Women’s Movement and gay rights groups, Shane Phelan explores the tension between liberal ideals of individual rights and tolerance and communitarian ideals of solidarity. The debate over lesbian sado-masochism—an expression of individual choice or pornographic, anti-feminist behavior?—is considered as a test case. Phelan addresses the problems faced by "the woman-identified woman" in a liberal society that presumes heterosexuality as the biological, psychological, and moral standard. Often silenced by laws defining their sexual behavior as criminal and censured by a medical establishment that persists in defining homosexuality as perversion, lesbians, like blacks and other groups, have fought to have the same rights as others in their communities and even in their own homes. Lesbian feminists have also sought to define themselves as a community that would be distinctly different, a community that would disavow the traditional American obsession with individual advancement in the world as it is. In this controversial study of political philosophy and the women’s movement, Phelan argues that "the failure to date to produce a satisfying theory and program for lesbian action is reflective of the failure of modern political thinking to produce a compelling, nonsuspect alternative to liberalism." In the series Women in the Political Economy, edited by Ronnie J. Steinberg. (shrink)

Environmental ethics has mostly been practiced separately from philosophy of technology, with few exceptions. However, forward thinking suggests that environmental ethics must become more interdisciplinary when we consider that almost everything affects the environment. Most notably,technology has had a huge impact on the natural realm. In the following discussion, the notions of synthesising philosophy of technology and environmental ethics are explored with a focus on research, development, and policy.

Phelan examines lesbian political theory and points out the pitfalls of a lesbian feminism that ignores the specificities of race. As she searches for a democratic identity politics, she explores the possibilities for lesbian community and for alliances with other groups, as well as the political goals of lesbian action.

The current linkages between ethical theory and management behavior are investigated in the wake of the much-publicized convictions of Enron executives. The vignettes used in this investigation represent ethical dilemmas in the areas of coercion and control, conflict of interest, physical environment, and personal integrity. Since 2003, and after the successful prosecution of Enron executives, the link between ethical philosophy and management behavior has shifted somewhat dramatically. There has been a significant change in the rational basis for managerial decision making. (...) In 2003, even after the Enron scandal was publicized, practitioners still relied heavily on both act and rule utilitarian ethical philosophies when making business decisions. Currently, the majority of respondents are likely to select ethically appropriate actions based on either rule utilitarian or rights rationales. It appears that ethical behavior is now more in line with ethical rhetoric, which may positively impact the ethical climate of business decision making. Apparently, business scandals of the past did not really impact actual ethical behavior much, but the high-profile prosecutions, convictions, and jail sentences may have impressed on managers that now is the time to incorporate ethics into business decisions. (shrink)