Backdating of stock options is an example of an agency problem. It has emerged despite all the measures (i.e., new regulations and additional corporate governance mechanisms) aimed at addressing such problems? Beyond such negative controlling measures, a more positive empowering approach based on ethics may also be necessary. What ethical measures need to be taken to address the agency problem? What values and norms should guide the board of directors in protecting the shareholders' interests? To examine these issues, we first (...) discuss the role values and norms can play with respect to underlying corporate governance and the proper role of directors, such as transparency, accountability, integrity (which is reflected in proper mechanisms of checks and balances), and public responsibility. Second, we discuss various stakeholder approaches (e.g., government, directors, managers, and shareholders) by which conflicts of interest (i.e., the agency problem) can be addressed. Third, we assess the practice of backdating stock options, as an illustration of the agency problem, in terms of whether the practice is legally acceptable or ethically justifiable. Fourth, we proceed to an analysis of good corporate governance practice involving backdating options based on a series of ethical standards including: (1) trustworthiness; (2) utilitarianism; (3) justice; and (4) Kantianism. We conclude that while executive compensation schemes (e. g., stock options) were originally intended to help remedy the agency problem by tying together the interests of the executives and shareholders, these schemes may have actually become "part of the problem," and that the solution ultimately depends upon whether directors and executives accept that all of their actions must be based on a set of core ethical values. (shrink)

This paper offers a novel interpretation of the political implications of Hobbes’s theory of imagination and his solution to the threat posed by the imagination to political stability. While recent work has correctly identified the problem the imagination poses for Hobbes, it has underestimated the severity of the problem and, accordingly, has underestimated the length to which the Hobbesian sovereign will have to go in order to solve it. By reconstructing Hobbes’s account of sleep and the operation of the imagination (...) during sleep, this paper argues that the Hobbesian sovereign who seeks to solve the problem of the imagination must maintain his subjects in a ‘state of sleep,’ by preventing any kind of new inputs from disturbing their imagination. This solution suggests that the citizens of the Leviathan state are not sleeping sovereigns, but rather sleeping subjects. (shrink)

In social and political theory, the imagination is often used in accounting both for creativity, innovation, and change and for sociopolitical stagnation and the inability to promote innovation and change. To what extent, however, can we attribute such seemingly contradictory outcomes to the same mental faculty? To address this question, this paper develops a comprehensive account of the political imagination, one that explains the various roles played by imagination in politics and thus accounts for the promises and limits of the (...) political imagination. This conceptualization of the political imagination allows us to account for the simultaneous presence of its seemingly contradictory roles—such as promoting stability and order on the one hand while generating creativity and critical innovation on the other. (shrink)

This article offers a new interpretation of the second ‘theological’ pattern in Plato’s Republic. Situating Plato within his religious context, it argues that this pattern calls into question the traditional ancient model of divine epiphany. Divine epiphany was a central element in Greek religion. Yet, in the absence of a centralized religious organization, this model threatened the philosophers’ authoritative position. Plato’s second pattern seeks not only to undermine this potential threat but also to pave the way towards a new, philosophicalmodel (...) of divine epiphany, thus further establishing the philosophers’ authority and legitimacy within and outside his ideal city. (shrink)

This article provides a new account of the role of phantasia, imagination, in Aristotle's political thought. Phantasia plays a key role in Aristotle's psychology and is crucial for explaining any kind of movement and action. I argue that this insight holds for collective actions as well. By offering a reconsideration of the famous “Wisdom of the Multitude” passage, this article shows that the capacity of a multitude to act together is tied to its ability to share a collective phantasma: a (...) mental representation of the practical end or goal of their collective effort as good and thus worthy of pursuit. However, I argue that given the subjective nature of phantasia, acting together can be hard. I conclude that since one's phantasia is shaped by one's moral character, a community can achieve a shared phantasma—and thus secure collective action—by means of persuasion, habituation, and education. (shrink)

This paper investigates the development of Hobbes’s theory of imagination and its unique intervention in the scientific debates of the seventeenth century. I argue that this intervention is designed to solve a tension between Hobbes’s scientific and political commitments. His scientific commitments led him to take the imagination seriously. While unorthodox in many ways, Hobbes was working within the predominant scientific framework of his time, which can be traced back to Aristotle and Galen. The same framework, however, was used for (...) naturalistic explanations for prophecy. This posed a problem for Hobbes, who was equally committed to the advances of science and to guarding against the political threat posed by prophets. I argue that Hobbes’s theory of imagination solves this tension by constructing a scientific account of imagination that is loyal to the leading scientific ideas while ruling out any potential use of imagination in the natural explanation of prophecy. (shrink)

In the process of implementing an ethical code of conduct, a business organization uses formal methods. Of these, training, courses and means of enforcement are common and are also suitable for self-regulation. The USA is encouraging business corporations to self regulate with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (FSG). The Guidelines prescribe similar formal methods and specify that, unless such methods are used, the process of implementation will be considered ineffective, and the business will therefore not be considered to have complied with (...) the guidelines. Business organizations invest enormous funds on formal methods. However, recent events indicate that these are not, by themselves, yielding the desired results. Our study, based on a sample of 812 employees and conducted in an Israeli subsidiary of a leading multinational High-Tech corporation headquartered in the US, indicates that, of the methods used in the process of implementation, one of the informal methods (namely, the social norms of the organization) is perceived by employees to have the most influence on their conduct. This result, when examined against employee tenure, remains relatively stable over the years, and stands in contradistinction to the formalistic approach embedded in the FSG. We indirectly measure the effectiveness of the percieved most influential implementation process methods by analyzing their impact on employee attitudes (namely, personal ethical commitment and employees'' commitment to organizational values). Our results indicate that the informal methods (manager sets an example or social norms of the organization) are likely to yield greater commitment with respect to both employee attitudes than the formal method (training and courses on the subject of ethics). The personal control method (my own personal values) differs significantly from all the other methods in that it yields the highest degree of personal ethical commitment and the lowest degree of employees'' commitment to organizational values. (shrink)

In the late 19th century great changes in theories of light and electricity were in direct conflict with certitude, the view that scientific knowledge is infallible. What is, then, the epistemic status of scientific theory? To resolve this issue Duhem and Poincaré proposed images of fallible knowledge, Instrumentalism and Conventionalism, respectively. Only in 1919–1922, after Einstein's relativity was published, he offered arguments to support Fallibilism, the view that certainty cannot be achieved in science. Though Einstein did not consider Duhem's Instrumentalism, (...) he argued against Poincaré's Conventionalism. Hitherto, Einstein's Fallibilism, as presented at first in a rarely known essay of 1919, was left in the dark. Recently, Howard obscured its meaning. Einstein's essay was never translated into English. In my paper I provide its translation and attempt to shed light on Einstein's view and its context; I also direct attention to Einstein's images of philosophical opportunism in scientific practice. (shrink)

On the True Sense of Art collects essays by philosophers responding to John Sallis's Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art as well as his other works on the philosophy of art, including Force of Imagination and Logic of Imagination. Each of the chapters, by some of the leading thinkers in Continental philosophy, engages Sallis's work on both ancient and new senses of aesthetics--a transfiguration of aesthetics--as a beginning that is always beginning again. With a responsive essay by Sallis himself, (...) On the True Sense of Art forms a critical introduction to the thought of this generation's most important aesthetician. (shrink)

Ethics should guide the design of electronic health records (EHR), and recognized principles of bioethics can play an important role. This approach was adopted recently by a team of informaticists designing and testing a system where patients exert granular control over who views their personal health information. While this method of building ethics in from the start of the design process has significant benefits, questions remain about how useful the application of bioethics principles can be in this process, especially when (...) principles conflict. For instance, while the ethical principle of respect for autonomy supports a robust system of granular control, the principles of beneficence and non-maleficence counsel restraint due to the danger of patients being harmed by restrictions on provider access to data. Conflict between principles has long been recognized by ethicists and has even motivated attacks on approaches that state and apply principles. In this paper we show how using ethical principles can help in the design of EHRs by first, explaining how ethical principles can and should be used generally, and then by, discuss how attention to details in specific cases can show that the tension between principles is not as bad as it initially appeared. We conclude by suggesting further ways in which the application of these (and other) principles can add value to the ongoing discussion of patient involvement in their health care. This is a new approach to linking principles to informatics design that we expect will stimulate further interest. (shrink)

Although there is a growing recognition that older adults and those with extensive comorbid conditions undergo cancer screening too frequently, there is little information about patients’ perceptions regarding cessation of cancer screening. Information on older adults’ views of screening cessation would be helpful both for clinicians and for those designing interventions to reduce overscreening.

Most people do not know there are different kinds of medical studies; some are conducted on people who already have a disease or medical condition, and others are performed on healthy volunteers who want to help science find answers. No matter what sort of research you are invited to participate in, or whether you are a patient when you are asked, it’s entirely up to you whether or not to do it. This decision is important and may have many implications (...) for your health and well-being, as well as those of other patients now and in the future. Making a good decision – the right one for you – requires you to become educated about topics you may not have thought about before, some of which may be quite complicated. This chapter explains the key issues to help you make a good decision. (shrink)

Objective: There are benefits and risks of giving patients more granular control of their personal health information in electronic health record (EHR) systems. When designing EHR systems and policies, informaticists and system developers must balance these benefits and risks. Ethical considerations should be an explicit part of this balancing. Our objective was to develop a structured ethics framework to accomplish this. -/- Methods: We reviewed existing literature on the ethical and policy issues, developed an ethics framework called a “Points to (...) Consider” (P2C) document, and convened a national expert panel to review and critique the P2C. -/- Results: We developed the P2C to aid informaticists designing an advanced query tool for an electronic health record (EHR) system in Indianapolis. The P2C consists of six questions (“Points”) that frame important ethical issues, apply accepted principles of bioethics and Fair Information Practices, comment on how questions might be answered, and address implications for patient care. -/- Discussion: The P2C is intended to clarify whatis at stake when designers try to accommodate potentially competing ethical commitments and logistical realities. The P2C was developed to guide informaticists who were designing a query tool in an existing EHR that would permit patient granular control. While consideration of ethical issues is coming to the forefront of medical informatics design and development practices, more reflection is needed to facilitate optimal collaboration between designers and ethicists. This report contributes to that discussion. (shrink)

We use screams to explore ideas presented in the target article. Evolving first in animals as a response to predation, screams reveal more complex social use in nonhuman primates and, in humans, uniquely, are associated with a much greater variety of emotional contexts including fear, anger, surprise, and happiness. This expansion, and the potential for manipulation, promotes listener social vigilance.

The Continental tradition has always placed great emphasis on the Logos. The Gift of Logos: Essays in Continental Philosophy celebrates and situates this emphasis in the genre of the gift and its giving. The process of receiving, or giving, of the gift overcomes the existential alienation and separation that is so present in the human condition. To ritualize giving and its gifting is to provide a syntax of solidarity that bespeaks our desire for cohesion and need for identities beyond our (...) own. To give a gift is to befriend. The gift of logos is more than a gift from the gods and goddesses; it is an act of giving for those friends of wisdom for those philosophers who give to each other and to their worlds and receive the blessings of logos from each other. The increasing objectification of human being has mobilized a regressive narcissism that shows the ego's reassertion in the light of the meaningless quantifying forces from without. By not reflecting deeply enough upon its conditions of existence in the modern world and on its orginary moments, philosophy itself has not been immune from this besotted sense of self. Although not an invective against thinking nor against modern and contemporary philosophy's genuine advances, The Gift of Logos portends to shed the delusion that theoretical re-description is somehow the same as transforming who we are. This transformation is our greatest gift to each other. To give it voice is the gift of Logos and what this collection of essays commemorates. (shrink)

This paper concerns the growing political polarization in the U.S. and the challenges faced by political activists in their effort to mobilize around struggles and demands for policy changes. We argue that basic income can serve as a key policy around which social movements and political activists of different beliefs systems – feminist activists, racial justice activists, liberal egalitarians, Marxists-socialists, and libertarians – could form an overlapping consensus. This would allow them to have a common political goal without having to (...) reach agreement over fundamental values, thus gaining more political visibility and increasing their ability to promote socio-political change. (shrink)

APPENDIX: The data emerging from the clinical and brain studies described above suggest that, in the case of OCD, there are two pertinent brain mechanisms that are distinguishable both in terms of neuro-dynamics and in terms of the conscious experiences that accompany them. These mechanisms can be characterized, on anatomical and perhaps evolutionary grounds, as a lower-level and a higher-level mechanism. The clinical treatment has, when successful, an activating effect on the higher-level mechanism, and a suppressive effect on the lower-level (...) one. (shrink)

Health care professionals who travel from their home countries to participate in humanitarian assistance or development work experience distinctive ethical challenges in providing care and services to populations affected by war, disaster or deprivation. Limited information is available about organizational practices related to preparation and support for health professionals working with non-governmental organizations. In this article, we present one component of the results of a qualitative study conducted with 20 Canadian health care professionals who participated in international aid work. The (...) findings reported here relate to expatriate clinicians’ experiences and perceptions of ethics preparation, training and support. The strategies examined include pre-departure training and preparation, in-field supports and retrospective debriefing of ethical issues. Participants experienced a range of training and supports as beneficial for addressing ethical challenges in humanitarian assistance and development work. Participants also expressed ambivalence or scepticism about the benefits offered by specific modalities. This analysis can contribute to informing discussions of how organizations and individual practitioners can best develop, implement and utilize ethics training and support for international aid work. (shrink)

What might a theory of mental imagery look like, and how might one begin formulating such a theory? These are the central questions addressed in the present paper. The first section outlines the general research direction taken here and provides an overview of the empirical foundations of our theory of image representation and processing. Four issues are considered in succession, and the relevant results of experiments are presented and discussed. The second section begins with a discussion of the proper form (...) for a cognitive theory, and the distinction between a theory and a model is developed. Following this, the present theory and computer simulation model are introduced. This theory specifies the nature of the internal representations (data structures) and the processes that operate on them when one generates, inspects, or transforms mental images. In the third, concluding, section we consider three very different kinds of objections to the present research program, one hinging on the possibility of experimental artifacts in the data, and the others turning on metatheoretical commitments about the form of a cognitive theory. Finally, we discuss how one ought best to evaluate theories and models of the sort developed here. (shrink)

Digital medicine is a medical treatment that combines technology with drug delivery. The promises of this combination are continuous and remote monitoring, better disease management, self-tracking, self-management of diseases, and improved treatment adherence. These devices pose ethical challenges for patients, providers, and the social practice of medicine. For patients, having both informed consent and a user agreement raises questions of understanding for autonomy and informed consent, therapeutic misconception, external influences on decision making, confidentiality and privacy, and device dependability. For providers, (...) digital medicine changes the relationship where trust can be verified, clinicians can be monitored, expectations must be managed, and new liability risks may be assumed. Other ethical questions include direct third-party monitoring of health treatment, affordability, and planning for adverse events in the case of device malfunction. This article seeks to lay out the ethical landscape for the implementation of such devices in patient care. (shrink)

A study was conducted in order to examine the relationship between corporate codes of ethics and behaviour. Fifty-seven interviews of employees, managers, and ethics officers were conducted at four large Canadian companies. The study found that codes of ethics are a potential factor influencing the behaviour of corporate agents. Reasons are provided why codes are violated as well as complied with. A set of eight metaphors are developed which help to explain how codes of ethics influence behaviour.

The data emerging from the clinical and brain studies described above suggest that, in the case of OCD, there are two pertinent brain mechanisms that are distinguishable both in terms of neuro dynamics and in terms of the conscious experiences that accompany them. These mechanisms can be characterized, on anatomical and perhaps evolutionary grounds, as a lower level and a higher level mechanism. The clinical treatment has, when successful, an activating effect on the higher level mechanism, and a suppressive effect (...) on the lower level one. (shrink)

Mucopolysaccharidosis type I (MPS I) is a rare lysosomal storage disorder treated with bone marrow transplantation or enzyme replacement therapy with laronidase, a high-cost orphan drug. Laronidase was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency in 2003 and by the Brazilian National Health Surveillance Agency in 2005. Many Brazilian MPS I patients have been receiving laronidase despite the absence of a governmental policy regulating access to the drug. Epidemiological and treatment data concerning MPS I (...) are scarce. This study aims to present a demographic profile of Brazilian patients with MPS I, describe the routes of access to laronidase in Brazil, and discuss associated ethical issues relating to public funding of orphan drugs. (shrink)

Neuropsychological research on the neural basis of behaviour generally posits that brain mechanisms will ultimately suffice to explain all psychologically described phenomena. This assumption stems from the idea that the brain is made up entirely of material particles and fields, and that all causal mechanisms relevant to neuroscience can therefore be formulated solely in terms of properties of these elements. Thus, terms having intrinsic mentalistic and/or experiential content (e.g. ‘feeling’, ‘knowing’ and ‘effort’) are not included as primary causal factors. This (...) theoretical restriction is motivated primarily by ideas about the natural world that have been known to be fundamentally incorrect for more than three-quarters of a century. Contemporary basic physical theory differs profoundly from classic physics on the important matter of how the consciousness of human agents enters into the structure of empirical phenomena. The new principles contradict the older idea that local mechanical processes alone can account for the structure of all observed empirical data. Contemporary physical theory brings directly and irreducibly into the overall causal structure certain psychologically described choices made by human agents about how they will act. This key development in basic physical theory is applicable to neuroscience, and it provides neuroscientists and psychologists with an alternative conceptual framework for describing neural processes. Indeed, owing to certain structural features of ion channels critical to synaptic function, contemporary physical theory must in principle be used when analysing human brain dynamics. The new framework, unlike its classic-physics-based predecessor, is erected directly upon, and is compatible with, the prevailing principles of physics. It is able to represent more adequately than classic concepts the neuroplastic mechanisms relevant to the growing number of empirical studies of the capacity of directed attention and mental effort to systematically alter brain function.. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 150-152.

College students from small, medium, and large institutions with either a modified or no honor code were presented with cheating scenarios and asked to rate how dishonest they perceived the behavior to be and the likelihood that they would report it. No main effects were found for institution size or type of honor code. Student–faculty ratio was not correlated with responses to the cheating scenarios. Students from modified honor code schools perceived more severe punishments for cheating and understood the reporting (...) process better than students from non–honor code schools. Implications for modified honor code systems are discussed. (shrink)

This article explores the accounts of Canadian-trained health professionals working in humanitarian and development organizations who considered not treating a patient or group of patients because of resource limitations. In the narratives, not treating the patient(s) was sometimes understood as the right thing to do, and sometimes as wrong. In analyzing participants’ narratives we draw attention to how medications and equipment are represented. In one type of narrative, medications and equipment are represented primarily as scarce resources; in another, they are (...) represented as patient care. In the contexts respondents were working, medications and equipment were often both patient care interventions and scarce resources. The analytic point is that health professionals tend to emphasize one conceptualization over the other in coming to assert that not treating is right, or wrong. Rendering tacit ethical frameworks more explicit makes them available for reflection and debate. (shrink)