Researchers and practitioners have devoted considerable attention to firms'' policies regarding discretionary disclosures. Prior studies argue that firms increase demand for their debt and equity issues and, thus, lower their cost of capital, by providing more informative disclosures. However, empirical research has generally not been able to document significant benefits from increased disclosure.This paper proposes an alternative explanation – firms disclose because it is the socially responsible thing to do. We argue that companies have incentives to engage in stakeholder management (...) by undertaking socially responsible activities and that providing extensive and informative disclosures is one such practice.We examine the relationship between firms'' disclosures and measures of social responsibility. We use ratings provided by the Council on Economic Priorities as proxies for the degree of social responsibility adopted by the sample firms. Disclosure rankings provided by the annual Association for Investment Management and Research Corporate Information Committee Reports (AIMR Reports) are used to measure disclosure level.Our results indicate that there is a positive relationship between disclosure level and corporate social responsibility. That is, firms that engage in socially responsive activities provide more informative and/or extensive disclosures than do companies that are less focused on advancing social goals. In addition, we find that socially responsible firms are more likely to provide this increased disclosure through better investor relations practices. These results support our contention that increased disclosure is a form of socially responsible behavior. (shrink)

A tribute to vision boards evaluates their creative, motivational, and inspirational role in providing visual life and career maps for famous and everyday ...

Working at The Hastings Center has been a tremendous professional stepping stone for me. I have long wanted to work in publishing, and I'm leaving the Center to work for America's oldest publisher, John Wiley and Sons. But I feel that my time here has been more than that‐that it has truly continued my education in ways I could not have anticipated. Thank you for letting me be part of your intellectual lives.

Watch a three-year-old play. As she enacts Ariel and Barbie’s judo match over which will marry Prince, or trudges through the living room scolding a pink polka-dotted bunny in a stroller, or explains to you that four-foot-tall Dora is in time out because she’s been hitting the other kids with a hammer—well, you may be laughing, but chances are she’s not. When you’re three, play is a serious, cathartic process aimed at sorting out and bringing under tenuous control the often (...) overwhelming emotional cues thrown at you each day. Children tease out what scares them—say, jealousy, or blame, or violent anger—and nail it down in particular scenarios that allow them to follow a feeling to its natural conclusions .. (shrink)

_Asking Good Questions_ moves beyond a traditional discussion of ethical theory, focusing on how educators can use these important frameworks to facilitate critical thinking about real-life ethical dilemmas. In this way, authors Nancy Stanlick and Michael Strawser offer students a theoretical tool kit for creatively addressing issues that influence their own environments. This text begins with a discussion of key ethical theorists and then guides the reader through a series of original case studies and follow-up activities that facilitate critical (...) thinking, emphasize asking thought provoking questions, and teach the student to address the complexity of ethical dilemmas while incorporating the viewpoints of their peers. Additionally, Stanlick and Strawser include an extensive preface, a mind-mapping technique for analyzing and formulating arguments, and a six step process for approaching complex real-life moral issues. Each chapter incorporates suggested assignments, discussion questions, and references for further reading, and a guide for instructors offering a sample course schedule and suggestions on how to use this book effectively is also available. This text is designed to help educators engage students in a meaningful discussion of how historical theories apply to their own lives, providing rich and unique resources to learn about these critical issues. (shrink)

In Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective, Joyce Slochower brings a contemporary relational framework to bear on Winnicott's notion of the analytic holding environment. She presents a fresh, thought-provoking, and clinically useful integration of Winnicott's seminal insights with contemporary relational and feminist/psychoanalytic contributions. Seeking to broaden the concept of holding beyond work with severely regressed patients, she addresses holding in a variety of clinical contexts and focuses especially on holding processes in relation to issues of dependence, self-involvement, and hate. (...) She also considers clinical work with patients "on the edge" - patients who seem deperately to need a holding experience that remains paradoxically elusive. Slochower begins her study by questioning the therapeutic limitations of an interactive style. There are times, she proposes, when certain patients simply cannot tolerate evidence of the analyst's separate subjective presence and instead need a holding experience. Though this holding function is essential to work with difficult patients, it enters into the treatment of all patients, whether as figure or ground. Slochower's relational understanding of holding leads her to consider the impact of holding on patient and analyst alike. Throughout, she emphasizes the analyst's and the patient's co-construction, during moments of holding, of an essential illusion of analytic attunement; this illusion serves to protect the patient from potentially disruptive aspects of the analyst's subjective presence. Slochower's case vignettes helpfully illuminate the intersubjective aspects of the holding process, including the clinical picture when a holding frame fails. She elaborates her thesis by considering the therapeutic function of holding in mourning. And she concludes her study with a cogent examination of the theoretical and clinical limitations of working with a holding process. A welcome reprise on an essential Winnicottian theme, Holding and Psychoanalysis broadens and deepens our understanding of the therapeutic role of the analyst's holding function. (shrink)

Describes 100 real-life ethical dilemmas faced by school administrators.

This study investigates professional tax practitioners' ethical judgments and behavioral intentions in cases involving client pressure to adopt aggressive reporting positions, an issue that has been identified as the most difficult ethical/moral problem facing public accounting practitioners. The multidimensional ethics scale (MES) was used to measure the extent to which a hypothetical behavior was consistent with five ethical philosophies (moral equity, contractualism, utilitarianism, relativism, and egoism). Responses from a sample of 67 tax professionals supported the existence of all dimensions of (...) the MES other than egoism. Regressions of ethical judgments and behavioral intentions on the MES dimensions indicate that ethical decision making is most heavily influenced by the moral equity dimension, followed by the contractualism dimension. In contrast, the utilitarianism and relativism dimensions were only related to ethical judgments and behavioral intentions in isolated instances. (shrink)

Although ever-increasing numbers of women in the United States have been choosing small-business ownership in an apparent attempt to escape their well-documented inequality in the labor market, in this country, small businesses owned by women tend to be less successful than those owned by men. This article brings together the scattered pieces of data available in order to shed light on women's inability to gain greater parity with men in the small-business arena in the United States. Analysis suggests that U.S. (...) women's influx into small capitalism results from their movement into expanding, but highly competitive, industrial niches that are relatively unattractive to men. The authors find that these woman-owned businesses are concentrated within traditionally female-typed fields with lower average business receipts than male-typed fields. Moreover, even within the same industrial subcategories, women owners achieve less economic success than men owners. Although some of the immediate barriers faced by U.S. women in the small-business arena-such as lack of access to capital and government contracts-differ from those that confront women employees, the underlying causes are similar. The authors' discussion suggests that women in the United States carry their labor market disadvantage with them to the small-business sphere, where it is compounded by new manifestations of the same institutional barriers. (shrink)

Arguing that Kierkegaard (1813-55) can and should be taken seriously as a philosopher even in today's postmodern climate, Strawser (philosophy, Folkuniversitetet, Helsingborg, Sweden) offers evidence that in marking the juncture between objective philosophy and philosophy that recognized its subjective and provisional nature, he represents not a break between the aesthetic and the religious but a bridge between them. Paper edition (unseen), $17.00. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Killing bin Laden: A Moral Analysis is a short treatise on the possible ethical justification for the U.S. mission to kill Osama bin Laden. After rejecting the standard justifications most commonly used in support of the killing, Strawser ultimately argues that the killing was ethically permissible as an act of defensive harm on behalf of innocents. The book contends bin Laden was morally responsible for a collection of unjust threats such that he was liable to be killed. Moreover, the (...) many unique features of the bin Laden case -such as the use of pre-emptive harm and the collective agency of al-Qaeda - do not defeat that liability. The monograph also includes discussions of the apparent violation of Pakistan's sovereignty and the morally dubious celebrations of bin Laden's death, among other morally relevant issues. (shrink)

Researchers have proposed that blocking facial feedback via glabellar-region botulinum toxin injections can reduce depression. Random-effects meta-analyses of studies that administered GBTX...

We propose that the prevalent moral aversion to AWS is supported by a pair of compelling objections. First, we argue that even a sophisticated robot is not the kind of thing that is capable of replicating human moral judgment. This conclusion follows if human moral judgment is not codifiable, i.e., it cannot be captured by a list of rules. Moral judgment requires either the ability to engage in wide reflective equilibrium, the ability to perceive certain facts as moral considerations, moral (...) imagination, or the ability to have moral experiences with a particular phenomenological character. Robots cannot in principle possess these abilities, so robots cannot in principle replicate human moral judgment. If robots cannot in principle replicate human moral judgment then it is morally problematic to deploy AWS with that aim in mind. Second, we then argue that even if it is possible for a sufficiently sophisticated robot to make ‘moral decisions’ that are extensionally indistinguishable from (or better than) human moral decisions, these ‘decisions’ could not be made for the right reasons. This means that the ‘moral decisions’ made by AWS are bound to be morally deficient in at least one respect even if they are extensionally indistinguishable from human ones. Our objections to AWS support the prevalent aversion to the employment of AWS in war. They also enjoy several significant advantages over the most common objections to AWS in the literature. (shrink)

In Plato’s Sophist (245e–247e) an argument against metaphysical materialism in the “battle of gods and giants” is presented which is oft the cause of consternation, primarily because it appears the characters are unfair to the materialist position. Attempts to explain it usually resort to restructuring the argument while others rearrange the Sophist entirely to rebuild the argument in a more satisfying form. I propose a different account of the argument that does not rely on a disservice to the materialist nor (...) restructuring Plato’s argument. I contend, instead, that the argument is enthymematic in nature, allowing the definitions employed to flow out of the reasoning as originally presented. Moreover, it suggests that Plato’s idealism was so deeply ingrained that modern defenses of materialism were not even live options. (shrink)

Are contemporary soldiers exploited by the state and society that they defend? More specifically, have America's professional service members disproportionately carried the moral weight of America's war-fighting decisions since the inception of an all-volunteer force? In this volume, Michael J. Robillard and Bradley J. Strawser, who have both served in the military, examine the question of whether and how American soldiers have been exploited in this way. Robillard and Strawser offer an original normative theory of 'moral exploitation'--the notion (...) that persons or groups can be wrongfully exploited by being made to shoulder an excessive amount of moral weight. They make the case that this exploitation accurately describes the relationship between the United States and the members of its military, and offer a thorough and in-depth analysis of some of the exploitative and misleading elements of present-day military recruitment, the moral burdens soldiers often bear, and the stifling effect that a 'Thank You for Your Service' and 'I support the troops' culture has had on serious public engagement about America's ongoing wars. Robillard and Strawser offer a piercing critique of the pernicious divide between military members and the civilians who direct them. They conclude by arguing for several normative and prudential prescriptions to help close this ever-widening fissure between the U.S. and its military, and within the U.S. itself. In so doing, their work gives a much needed and urgent voice to America's soldiers, the other 1%. (shrink)

The primary impediment to formulating a general theory for adaptive evolution has been the unknown distribution of fitness effects for new beneficial mutations. By applying extreme value theory, Gillespie circumvented this issue in his mutational landscape model for the adaptation of DNA sequences, and Orr recently extended Gillespie's model, generating testable predictions regarding the course of adaptive evolution. Here we provide the first empirical examination of this model, using a single-stranded DNA bacteriophage related to phiX174, and find that our data (...) are consistent with Orr's predictions, provided that the model is adjusted to incorporate mutation bias. Orr's work suggests that there may be generalities in adaptive molecular evolution that transcend the biological details of a system, but we show that for the model to be useful as a predictive or inferential tool, some adjustments for the biology of the system will be necessary. (shrink)

A variety of ethical objections have been raised against the military employment of uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs, drones). Some of these objections are technological concerns over UAVs abilities’ to function on par with their inhabited counterparts. This paper sets such concerns aside and instead focuses on supposed objections to the use of UAVs in principle. I examine several such objections currently on offer and show them all to be wanting. Indeed, I argue that we have a duty to protect an (...) agent engaged in a justified act from harm to the greatest extent possible, so long as that protection does not interfere with the agent's ability to act justly. UAVs afford precisely such protection. Therefore, we are obligated to employ UAV weapon systems if it can be shown that their use does not significantly reduce a warfighter's operational capability. Of course, if a given military action is unjustified to begin with, then carrying out that act via UAVs is wrong, just as it would be with any weapon. But the point of this paper is to show that there is nothing wrong in principle with using a UAV and that, other things being equal, using such technology is, in fact, obligatory. (shrink)