Steffen Ganghof’s book addresses pressing questions in democratic theory and institutional design regarding how to promote effective political inclusion and avoid personalizing power in democratic executives. His model of semi-parliamentarism manages to transform tradeoffs in these areas that were previously thought inescapable, unlocking novel potential for democratic reform.

This article responds to critical reflections on my Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism by Sarah Birch, Kevin J. Elliott, Claudia Landwehr and James L. Wilson. It discusses how different types of representative democracy, especially different forms of government (presidential, parliamentary or hybrid), can be justified. It clarifies, among other things, the distinction between procedural and process equality, the strengths of semi-parliamentary government, the potential instability of constitutional designs, and the difference that theories can make in actual processes of constitutional reform.

Cultures around the world have regarded self-fulfillment as the ultimate goal of human striving and as the fundamental test of the goodness of a human life. The ideal has also been criticized, however, as egotistical or as so value-neutral that it fails to distinguish between, for example, self-fulfilled sinners and self-fulfilled saints. Alan Gewirth presents here a systematic and highly original study of self-fulfillment that seeks to overcome these and other arguments and to justify the high place that the ideal (...) has been accorded. He does so by developing an ethical theory that ultimately grounds the value of self-fulfillment in the idea of the dignity of human beings.Gewirth begins by distinguishing two models of self- fulfillment--aspiration-fulfillment and capacity-fulfillment--and shows how each of these contributes to the intrinsic value of human life. He then distinguishes between three types of morality--universalist, particularist, and personalist--and shows how each contributes to the values embodied in self-fulfillment. Building on these ideas, he develops a Odialectical' conception of reason that shows how human rights are central to self-fulfillment. Gewirth also argues that self-fulfillment has a social as well as an individual dimension: that the nature of society and the obstacles that disadvantaged groups face affect strongly the character of the self-fulfillment that persons can achieve.Bold in scope and rigorous in execution, Self-Fulfillment is a powerful new contribution to moral, social, and political philosophy. (shrink)

Scheler’s theory of the person is at the center of his philosophy and one of the most celebrated of his achievements. It is somewhat surprising, then, that a straightforward and sufficient account of the person is missing from his works, an omission felt most keenly in that work which is in large measure dedicated to forging a new personalism: The Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. In his explicit accounts of what a person is, Scheler stresses its (...) spirituality and claims that it lives and has its being wholly in the execution of its acts. But in forging his personalism, Scheler makes a number of claims which require an account of the person that reaches deeper than its executed acts. In this essay, I focus on the accounts of the person given in the Formalism and use Scheler toimprove Scheler’s theory of the person. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Note of Interpretation: Theistic Finitism as an Aesthetics of Religious NaturalismAndrew Stone Porter (bio)In our cosmological construction we are, therefore, left with the final opposites, joy and sorrow, good and evil, disjunction and conjunction—that is to say, the many in one—flux and permanence, greatness and triviality, freedom and necessity, God and the World. In this list, the pairs of opposites are in experience with a certain ultimate directness (...) of intuition, except in the case of the last pair. God and the World introduce the note of interpretation.—Alfred North Whitehead1Theistic finitism, the position that God is not omnipotent, is the most tenable solution to the problem of evil—but it also necessitates a slide toward immanence. Among the ranks of the finitists we find philosophers such as William James,2 process thinkers such as Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne,3 theological personalists such as Edgar Brightman (and, Rufus Burrow argues, his pupil Martin Luther King, Jr.),4 feminist disability theologians like Julia Watts Belser,5 and popular religion writers such as Harold Kushner.6 Like many others, Kushner found in finitism not an answer to an abstract theological puzzle, but an existentially necessary salve for the despair that nearly overtook him when his three year-old son was diagnosed with a terminal degenerative disease. No loving, all-knowing, all-powerful creator would ever allow such [End Page 70] a thing to happen, Kushner reasoned. If God is not all-powerful, then God need not be the author of our pain, but a friend who hurts with us as we bear it. Rather than sadistic puppeteer, a finite God becomes “the fellow-sufferer who understands.”7 As Jürgen Moltmann put it, “the one who cannot suffer cannot love either. So [God] is also a loveless being.”8 Or, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer reflected as he awaited execution in a Nazi concentration camp, “Only the suffering God can help.”9However, when one strips away divine omnipotence, one must also bid adieu either to God’s omniscience or creator-hood: for an omniscient creator, crafting the world with full knowledge of how everything would unfold, would be ipso facto omnipotent. We are left, then, with the following alternatives: we could posit a God who pressed the “create world” button not knowing what would happen (which seems irresponsible, calling into question God’s goodness)—as Tim Bayne puts it, “If future contingents fall outside the scope of God’s knowledge, then creation was a massive gamble.”10 We may share Albert Einstein’s famous distaste for a God who plays dice with the universe. The other alternative is that God’s knowledge and power are partial, that the Divine is merely one being/force among many. But if God is “just a stranger on the bus, trying to make his way home,”11 then in what sense can we say that God is God at all?This paper offers a construal of theistic finitism as a form of religious naturalism with an aesthetics of empathetic solidarity. That is, when we relinquish belief in God’s omnipotence, instead imagining that God is struggling and suffering along with us, we relinquish as well belief in an overbearing “supernatural realm” or “order” governing/underlying all things. To see God in this way, as Whitehead says, is to “introduce the note of interpretation.” And that note, I suggest, is a musical note, specifically a blues note.12 To call the loving [End Page 71] friendship we experience “God” is an aesthetic choice, an informed way of interpreting life in order to move through it with companionship, tenderness and care. A naturalistic religiosity, in Carol Wayne White’s phrasing, “can be a mode of reflecting on, experiencing, and envisioning one’s relationality with all that is.”13 In this way theology becomes, as Belser puts it, “a grammar of the imagination.”14 As a blues aesthetics of empathetic solidarity, theistic finitism may be considered a form of religious naturalism particularly well-suited to our present moment, mired as it is in cascading crises and careening into catastrophe. I suggest that, as young spiritual seekers exit churches in search of more meaningful community... (shrink)

Locke's conceptualization of sovereignty and its uses, combining theological, social, and political perspectives, testifies to his intellectual profundity that was spurred by his endeavour to re-traditionalize a changing world. First, by relying on the traditional, personalistic notion of polity, Locke developed a concept of sovereignty that bore the same sense of authority as the “right of commanding” attributable only to real persons. Second, he managed to reconcile the unitary nature of sovereignty with the plurality of its uses, mainly through a (...) conception of the dual, vertical separation of functions, which implied degrees rather than kinds of sovereignty. While absolute sovereignty belongs to God, Locke argued, relative sovereignty, separated into “potential” and “actual” sovereignty, is vested in the community on the grounds of the Edenic testament with God. The community, established by a fundamental, single contract, is divided into “society”—to fulfil the function of legislation, which signifies the potential sovereignty of the community, so as to cultivate common law , and into “government”—to undertake the execution, which signifies the actual sovereignty of the king, of common law so as to procure common wealth. (shrink)

This is the 1965 Saint Augustine Lecture, the seventh in the annual series. It would have been difficult to find someone more knowledgeable on Augustine's thought than M. Marrou, and the result is something of a synoptic view of Augustine's thought through the unifying perspective of his theology of embodiment. The whole of this very short book is executed with such scholarly ease and impressiveness that Marrou's conclusion after only twenty nine pages that Augustine is the precursor of modern (...) class='Hi'>personalism seems in need of no more justification.—E. A. R. (shrink)

Michael Peters, Sonja Arndt & Marek TesarThis is a collective writing experiment of PESA members, including its Executive Committee, asking questions of the Philosophy of Education in a New Key. Co...

The performance of 93 children aged 3 and 4 years on a battery of different counterfactual tasks was assessed. Three measures: short causal chains, location change counterfactual conditionals, and false syllogisms—but not a fourth, long causal chains—were correlated, even after controlling for age and receptive vocabulary. Children's performance on our counterfactual thinking measure was predicted by receptive vocabulary ability and inhibitory control. The role that domain general executive functions may play in 3- to 4-year olds' counterfactual thinking development is (...) discussed. (shrink)

There are legitimate worries about gaps between scientific evidence of brain states and function (for example, as evidenced by fMRI data) and legal criteria for determining criminal culpability. In this paper I argue that behavioral evidence of capacity, motive and intent appears easier for judges and juries to use for purposes of determining criminal liability because such evidence triggers the application of commonsense psychological (CSP) concepts that guide and structure criminal responsibility. In contrast, scientific evidence of neurological processes and function (...) – such as evidence that the defendant has a large brain tumor – will not generally lead a judge or jury to directly infer anything that is relevant to the legal determination of criminal culpability . (Vincent 2008) In these cases, an expert witness will be required to indicate to the fact-finder what this evidence means with regard to mental capacity; and then another inference will have to be made from this possible lack of capacity to the legal criteria for guilt, cast in CSP terms.<br><br>To reliably link evidence of brain function and structure and assessment of criminal responsibility, we need to re-conceptualize the mental capacities necessary for responsibility, particularly those that are recognized as missing or compromised by the doctrines of “legal capacity” (Hart 1968) and “diminished capacity.” I argue that formulating these capacities as executive functions within the brain can provide this link. I further claim that it would be extremely useful to consider evidence of executive function as related to the diminished capacity doctrine at sentencing. This is because it is primarily at this stage in criminal proceedings where the use of the diminished capacity doctrine is most prevalent, as evidenced by the recent Supreme Court cases of Atkins v. Virginia (536 U.S. 304 (2002)) and Roper v. Simmons (543 U.S. 551 (2005)).<br>. (shrink)

I broadly explore the question by examining several common criticisms of CEO pay through both philosophical and empirical lenses. While some criticisms appear to be unfounded, the analysis shows not only that current compensation practices are problematic both from the standpoint of distributive justice and fairness, but also that incentive pay ultimately exacerbates the very agency problem it is purported to solve.

Children and adolescents are not indifferent to the dramatic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the need to be forced to live in confinement. The change in life to which they have been abruptly subjected forces us to understand the state of their mental health in order to adequately address both their present and future needs. The present study was carried out with the intention of studying the consequences of confinement on anxiety, sleep routines and executive functioning of 1,028 (...) children and adolescents, aged from 6 to 18 years, residing in Spain to; assess if there are differences regarding these consequences in terms of sex and age; how anxiety affects executive functioning in males and females; and to examine the possible correlations between the measured variables. For this purpose, an online questionnaire containing five sections was designed: the first section gathers information on sociodemographic and health data, while the following sections gather information from different standardized scales which measure anxiety, sleep and executive functions, whose items were adapted in order to be completed by parents, and/or legal guardians. The statistical analyzes carried out highlights significant differences in executive functioning between males and females. In turn, in regards to age, greater difficulties were detected in anxiety in the 9 to 12 age group and greater sleep disturbances between 13 and 18 year olds. On the other hand, significant differences were found in intra-sexual executive functioning depending on whether they presented greater or lesser anxiety, with executive functioning being more tendentiously maladjusted in males than in females, revealing a significantly relevant effect size. Positive correlations are obtained between state anxiety and sleep and executive functioning alterations. Finally, through Path Analysis, it is verified that state anxiety is the variable with the greatest weight within the model that would explain the alteration in the executive functioning of the present sample. (shrink)

Some virtue ethicists are reluctant to consider principles and standards in business ethics. However, this is problematic. This paper argues that realistic Personalism can be integrated into virtue-based business ethics, giving it a more complete base. More specifically, two principles are proposed: the Personalist Principle (PP) and the Common Good Principle (CGP). The PP includes the Golden Rule and makes explicit the duty of respect, benevolence, and care for people, emphasizing human dignity and the innate rights of every human (...) being. The CGP entails cooperation to promote conditions which enhance the opportunity for the human flourishing of all people within a community. Both principles have practical implications for business ethics. (shrink)

To deal with potential conflicts between the triple-bottom-line expectations of investors and the performance of executives, firms can use incentives by integrating corporate social performance targets into executive compensation. No evidence yet exists that CSP targets in executive compensation actually lead to an improvement of CSP results. Using a panel data set of 400 firms for the years 2008–2012 leading to 1846 firm-year observations, the relationships between CSP targets and CSP results and CSP improvements are analyzed. The results (...) show that the level of CSP has no effect on the use of CSP targets, the use of CSP targets in general does not automatically lead to better CSP results, and the use of quantitative, hard CSP targets is an effective way to improve CSP results, especially to lower CSP weaknesses. (shrink)

This study investigated relationships between inter-class variations in paranormal experience and executive functions. A sample of 516 adults completed self-report measures assessing personal encounter-based paranormal occurrences, executive functions together with Emotion Regulation and Belief in the Paranormal. Paranormal belief served as a measure of convergent validity for experience-based phenomena. Latent profile analysis combined experience-based indices into four classes based on sample subpopulation scores. Multivariate analysis of variance then examined interclass differences. Results revealed that breadth of paranormal experience was (...) associated with higher levels of executive functioning difficulties for General Executive Function, Working Memory, Decision Making, and Belief in the Paranormal. On the Everyday Memory Questionnaire, scores differed on Attention Tracking and Factor 3, but not Retrieval. In the case of the Emotion Regulation Scale, class scores varied on Expressive Suppression, however, no difference was evident on Cognitive Reappraisal. Overall, inter-class comparisons identified subtle differences in executive functions related to experience. Since the present study was exploratory, sampled only a limited subset of executive functions, and used subjective, self-report measures, further research is necessary to confirm these outcomes. This should employ objective tests and include a broader range of executive functions. (shrink)

The present study investigated the cross-cultural variations in parents' views on the role of play in child development and the primary purpose of preschool education from Ethiopia and Hungary. It also examined the cross-cultural variations in preschoolers' executive functions, the frequency of their engagement in home activities, and the role of these activities in the development of EF skills. Participants included 266 preschoolers with their parents. The independent samples t-test showed that Ethiopian parents view fostering academic skills for preschooler (...) significantly more important than their Hungarian counterparts do. We also found that while Ethiopian parents hold the belief that academic and cognitive development is the major purpose of preschool education, Hungarian prioritize social-emotional development and entertainment. Additionally, preschoolers in Ethiopia were reported to engage in academic and arts and crafts activities after preschool significantly more frequently than their Hungarian counterparts. On the contrary, preschoolers in Hungary were found to engage in fine-motor activities, solitary play, sports and other physical activities significantly more frequently than their Ethiopian counterparts. No significant differences were found in EF skills between preschoolers from Ethiopia and Hungary. Results from hierarchical regression analyses showed that, after accounting for age and SES, preschoolers' frequency of pretend play and their parents' play support beliefs were found to be small to medium-sized predictors of inhibitory control skills in both samples. However, children's frequency of having breakfast at home was another significant predictor in the Ethiopian sample only. The frequency of participation in arts and crafts and other fine-motor activities were found to be important predictors of preschoolers' visual-spatial working memory skills in the Ethiopian and the Hungarian samples, respectively. We also found that, after controlling for SES, parental play support was an important factor associated with preschoolers' shifting skills only in the Hungarian sample. Based on the findings, we made important conclusions. (shrink)

We examine how UK listed companies set executive pay, considering the implications of following best practice in corporate governance and how this canconflict with what stakeholders might perceive as good behaviour. We do this by presenting the results of 40 interviews with protagonists in the debate, setting out the dilemmas faced by remuneration-setters, and how the processes they follow can lead to ethical conflicts. Overall, we conclude that although best practice might drive good behaviour, it often does not.

This study compared professional and amateur classical musicians matched for age, gender, and education on reaction times during the Stroop color-word test, brainwaves during an auditory ERP task and during paired reaction-time tasks, responses on the Gibbs Sociomoral Reflection questionnaire, and self-reported frequencies of peak experiences. Professional musicians were characterized by: lower color-word interference effects , faster categorization of rare expected stimuli , and a trend for faster processing of rare unexpected stimuli , higher scores on the Sociomoral Reflection questionnaire, (...) and more frequent peak experiences during rest, tasks, and sleep. Both groups had high values on the Brain Integration Scale. These findings are interpreted in light of a Unified Theory of Performance, which posits that effectiveness in any area is influenced by one’s level of mind-brain development—emotional, cognitive, moral, ego and cortical development—with higher mind-brain development supporting greater effectiveness in any domain. (shrink)

The non-credit bearing and ongoing education and development of mid- to late-career corporate executives is known by the compound term executive education. Reductively stated, executive education, for its corporate consumers and its business school providers, is predicated on the relationship between an order and its execution ; a relationship I call the “order-execution cognate”. With the word execution derived from Greek for sequence, and with the sequence of an execution following-on from its corresponding order, sequentiality is the essence (...) of execution, and the cognate. Executive education involves the amelioration of this order-execution cognate, to the ends of increased profits and competitiveness for the corporation concerned, and increased career prospects for the individual executive. Concerning sequentiality, and as a thesis on the philosophy of executive education, I apply a strand of ontological reflection to examine this cognate, namely philosophy concerning time and temporal succession. To aid in this task I use the English translations of writings on time by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Emerging from Heidegger’s thought are two temporal types that acknowledge and critique temporal succession; chronological time and Kairotic time respectively. By associating Heidegger’s philosophic method with that of early German Romantic philosophy, I articulate how it is possible to reconceive the temporal sequence of the order-execution cognate as a productive oscillation between chronic and Kairotic time; I call this oscillation “ironic temporality,” and its productivity “ironic productivity”. My philosophical analysis of commercially lucrative and neoliberal executive education is at odds with traditional knowledge-based analyses, affording a critique of the capitalist order which the educative event serves. Disrupting temporal notions of that event then becomes a dangerous political act; becomes the means to frame the educative event for the management of our age; and becomes the new orders for executive education. (shrink)

We examine how UK listed companies set executive pay, considering the implications of following best practice in corporate governance and how this canconflict with what stakeholders might perceive as good behaviour. We do this by presenting the results of 40 interviews with protagonists in the debate, setting out the dilemmas faced by remuneration-setters, and how the processes they follow can lead to ethical conflicts. Overall, we conclude that although best practice might drive good behaviour, it often does not.

We examine how UK listed companies set executive pay, reviewing the implications of following best practice in corporate governance and examining how this can conflict with what shareholders and other stakeholders might perceive as good behaviour. We do this by considering current governance regulation in the light of interviews with protagonists in the debate, setting out the dilemmas faced by remuneration-setters, and showing how the processes they follow can lead to ethical conflicts. Current 'best' practice governing executive pay (...) includes the use of market benchmarks to determine salary and bonus levels, significant levels of performance-related pay, the desire for executives to hold equity in their companies, the disclosure of total shareholder return compared to an index, and a perceived need for conformity, in order to grant legitimacy to policies. Whilst each of these may in some circumstances lead to good practice, each has the potential to cause dysfunctional behaviour in executives. Overall, we conclude that although best practice might drive good executive behaviour that coincides with the company's and key stakeholders' objectives, there are many reasons why it should not. (shrink)