Virtue ethics has often been regarded as complementary or laissez-faire ethics in solving business problems. This paper seeks conceptual and methodological improvements by developing a virtue character scale that will enable assessment of the link between organizational level virtue and organizational performance, financial or non-financial. Based upon three theoretical assumptions, multiple studies were conducted; the content analysis of 158 Fortune Global 500 firms ethical values and a survey of 2548 customers and employees. Six dimensions of organizational virtue (Integrity, Empathy, Warmth, (...) Courage, Conscientiousness and Zeal) are identified through confirmatory factor analysis, and validated against satisfaction measure. Strategic implications of virtue characters are discussed. (shrink)

To understand Lacan’s thinking process on vision, the entirety of his teaching must be taken into consideration. Until the 60s, the visual field is the imaginary, the constitutive principle of reality in its phenomenal giving to the experience of a subject. This register is the opposite of the field of the word with the L schema and, subsequently, as subordinated to the symbolic system according to the model of the optical schema of the inverted flower vase of Bouasse. It is (...) only with the 1964 seminar that Lacan makes a daring turnaround through which the visual becomes a sign of the emergence of a real that is irreducible to both reality and the mediation of the subject of knowledge. The split that separates reality and the real is reproduced in Lacan within the visual field, which is, on the one hand, the cardinal principle of the consistency of the experience of reality, and on the other, it is an element of irreducibility to reality. This produces a cascade of consequences: first of all, the modification of the presentation of the mirror stage. Unlike the voice, which through prosody, tone, and volume, finds some strips with which anchor itself imaginatively to reality, the gaze, invisible and elusive, escapes the imaginary grasp. Captured in myths, it reveals its power and ability to annihilate—as in the myth of Medusa’s gaze—or to make people fall in love but only with a narcissistic love that leads inexorably to death as in the myth of Narcissus. The gaze is elusive because the subject is dependent on it in the field of desire. Like the voice, it is about the desire on which the subject is supported; it is one of the objects on which the phantom depends. In our opinion, thanks to this characteristic, the gaze object can make remote psychoanalytic treatment possible through easily accessible videoconferencing tools and, at the same time, create new conditions within it that should be carefully evaluated to understand its implications in the session itself. (shrink)

This study compares the different emphases on virtuous characters presented in their values, across global firms considering country and industry of origin. It presents a content analysis of the 122 codes of conduct statements from Fortune Global 500 firms, drawn from four sectors and using correspondence analysis. American firms tend to emphasize courage, while European firms emphasize integrity and empathy, surprisingly with Asian firms being closer to European ones. Retailers and pharmaceutical firms emphasize empathy, while banks and petroleum emphasize courage. (...) This study extends the newly emerging strategic paradigm of organizational virtue, by introducing an empirical study of ethical values. Implications for multinational companies are then discussed. (shrink)

The significance of critical phenomenology for psychiatric praxis has yet to be expounded. In this paper, I argue that the adoption of a critical phenomenological stance can remedy localised instances of hermeneutical injustice, which may arise in the encounter between clinicians and patients with psychosis. In this context, what is communicated is often deemed to lack meaning or to be difficult to understand. While a degree of un-shareability is inherent to subjective life, I argue that issues of unintelligibility can be (...) addressed by shifting from individualistic conceptions of understanding to an interactionist view. This takes into account the contextual, historical and relational background within which meaning is co-constituted. I conclude by providing a corrective for hermeneutical injustice, which entails a specific attentiveness towards the person’s subjectivity, a careful sensitivity to contingent meaning-generating structures, and a degree of hermeneutical flexibility as an attitude of openness towards alternative horizons of possibility. (shrink)

While the concept of adaptive preferences is an important tool for criticizing injustice, it is often claimed that using the concept involves showing disrespect for persons judged to have adaptive preferences. In this paper, I propose an account of adaptive preferences that does the relevant political work while still showing persons two centrally important kinds of respect. My account is based in what I call an indirect substantive account of autonomy, which places substantive requirements on the options available to a (...) person, rather than on the option that she ultimately prefers. This allows us to pinpoint cases in which a person's circumstances have rendered her insufficiently autonomous, without saying that any conception of the good must be non-autonomous tout court. (shrink)

I propose that we can explain the contribution of mental time travel to agency through understanding it as a specific instance of our more general capacity for narrative understanding. Narrative understanding involves the experience of a pre-reflective and embodied sense of self, which co-emerges with our emotional involvement with a sequence of events. Narrative understanding of a sequence of events also requires a ‘recombinable system’, that is, the ability to combine parts to make myriad sequences. Mental time travel shares these (...) two characteristics: it involves an embodied sense of self and the ability to create novel scenarios. What is unique about mental time travel is that it is a story explicitly about our selves, and it involves metarepresentation. Agency is enabled by narrative understanding when we are able to put our current situation into a larger narrative context, whereby some possible actions, but not others, make sense. However, new features of agency are enabled when we understand stories that are explicitly about our selves: we gain the ability to plan and act on plans. (shrink)

The brain is often taken to be a paradigmatic example of a signaling system with semantic and representational properties, in which neurons are senders and receivers of information carried in action potentials. A closer look at this picture shows that it is not as appealing as it might initially seem in explaining the function of the brain. Working from several sender-receiver models within the teleosemantic framework, I will first argue that two requirements must be met for a system to support (...) genuine semantic information: 1. The receiver must be competent —that is, it must be able to extract rewards from its environment on the basis of the signals that it receives. 2. The receiver must have some flexibility of response relative to the signal received. In the second part of the paper, this initial framework will be applied to neural processes, pointing to the surprising conclusion that signaling at the single-neuron level is only weakly semantic at best. Contrary to received views, neurons will have little or no access to semantic information (though their patterns of activity may carry plenty of quantitative, correlational information) about the world outside the organism. Genuine representation of the world requires an organism - level receiver of semantic information, to which any particular set of neurons makes only a small contribution. (shrink)

Are there representations in the brain? It depends on what you mean by representations, and it depends on what you want them to do for you—both in terms of the causal role they play in the system, and in terms of their explanatory value. But ideally, we would like an account of representation that allows us to assign a representational role and content to the appropriate mechanistic precursors of behavior that in fact play that role and conversely, search for the (...) mechanistic realizers of representational roles that are posited by our models of behavior and cognition. Such an account would be methodologically valuable in neuroscience. Lately, people have started asking similar questions about deep neural networks. What representations do they learn and use, and what is the relation between those representations and the sometimes impressive capacities these networks exhibit? More philosophically puzzling, perhaps, is the question of why the internal activities or dispositions labeled as such in neuroscience and AI research should count as representations at all. I think we can give a unified answer to both sets of questions, in the form of a kind of representational pragmatism. What makes something a representation just is that we can identify and re-identify it as such, and moreover, that we can manipulate it effectively to do whatever it is that we think representations ought to do for us in that particular context. For the first condition, the idea is that so long as we have some probe that allows us to pick out the relevant causally effective candidate, we should consider that to be a candidate representation-relative-to-that-probe. The second condition can be understood as a kind of anti-gerrymandering constraint: one ought to be able to intervene on the candidate, and see effects of that intervention consistent with the functional role the representation is supposed to play. Naturally the details need to be spelled out for different contexts—and I will articulate them for a few illustrative cases—which effectively allows for a kind of pluralism about representation depending on the setting and the kinds of questions being asked. With the extra components filled in, representational pragmatism can make sense of existing practices in neuroscience and AI, as well as their relationship to naturalistic theories of representation in philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophical proponents of predictive processing cast the novelty of predictive models of perception in terms of differences in the functional role and information content of neural signals. However, they fail to provide constraints on how the crucial semantic mapping from signals to their informational contents is determined. Beyond a novel interpretative gloss on neural signals, they have little new to say about the causal structure of the system, or even what statistical information is carried by the signals. That means that (...) the predictive framework for perception can be relabeled in traditional, non-predictive terms, with no empirical consequences relevant to existing or future data. To the extent that neuroscientific research based on predictive processing is both innovative and productive, it will be due to the framework’s suggestive heuristic effects, or perhaps auxiliary empirical claims about implementation, rather than a difference in the information-processing structure that it describes. (shrink)

Industrial pollution is of both national and international concern in the context where one country's emissions contribute to the problem of global warming. Existing studies have focused on government and regulations rather than on employees. The context of this study is in respect of 472 workers in seven Chinese energy companies in Shanxi province in China, one of the biggest coal mining regions and a region most responsible for environmental pollution. The key findings are two-fold: first, employees' values were positively (...) correlated with attitudes toward the environment, which also correlates with perceived corporate citizenship; second, the ownership type of the firm had a significant influence on corporate citizenship, employee values and their attitudes toward environment. Contrary to existing beliefs, Stateowned enterprises in China have much poorer ratings on all the three constructs compared to privately owned companies. The results highlight the role of the government and policy makers in shaping employees' attitudes toward the environment, and in turn the corporate citizenship of the Chinese energy industry. (shrink)

Multiple realizability says that the same kind of mental states may be manifested by systems with very different physical constitutions. Putnam ( 1967 ) supposed it to be “overwhelmingly probable” that there exist psychological properties with different physical realizations in different creatures. But because function constrains possible physical realizers, this empirical bet is far less favorable than it might initially have seemed, especially when we take on board the richer picture of neural and brain function that neuroscience has been uncovering (...) over the past forty years, in which all sorts of brain activities play crucial roles beyond all-or-nothing electrical signaling. Because of its evolutionary history, the brain’s metabolic and informational processes are inextricably intertwined. The resulting complex integrated functions impose more constraints on possible realizers than the clean, single-purpose functions usually cited as examples in discussions of multiple realizability—with ramifications for the functionalist and computationalist foundations of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for the counter-intuitive conclusion that the same adaptive preference can be both prudentially good and prudentially bad for its holder: that is, it can be prudentially objectionable from one temporal perspective, but prudentially unobjectionable from another. Given the possibility of transformative experiences, there is an important sense in which even worrisome adaptive preferences can be prudentially good for us. That is, if transformative experiences lead us to develop adaptive preferences, then their objects can become prudentially (...) better for our actual selves than the objects of their non-adaptive alternatives would now be. I also argue, however, that the same worrisome adaptive preferences might still be prospectively prudentially objectionable: that is, our pre-transformation selves might be prudentially better off undergoing a non-adaptive alternative transformative experience instead. I argue that both claims hold across the range of the most broadly-defended accounts of well-being in the literature. (shrink)

Sándor Márai: Consciousness of Reality, Creator of History shows the way Márai builds a series of characters based on Divorce in Buddha, instead of the concept of historical novel. Thanks to their connection between consciousness and reality, these characters are able to recognize themselves in the confessional space and they are regarded as representatives of unofficial history.

As the “Sacred Place”—meant as the new space for religions offered by the Internet—demands for continuous investigations on the encounter between traditional narratives and social practices, the rapid growth of Question and Answering websites asks for improving social research about the Authenticity of the religious feeling as well as their responsibility in the construction of a shared knowledge. In this background, the aim of this study is to investigate the role of Q&A websites as additional interpretative resources in accordance with (...) different religious forms of life. About 800 extracts—composed by questions and answers—from the religious pages of Stack Exchange were analyzed, in accordance with social discursive psychology, through bottom-up and top-down pathways. In relation to the different emerging questioners’ profiles, the rhetoric of “closeness” and “openness” reveal a dialectic trend of these websites in offering both supplementary and extending religious experiences. (shrink)

How do engineers respond to ethical dilemmas that occur in practice? How do they view their individual and collective responsibilities? How do they make decisions before all the facts are in? Using the space shuttle programme as the framework, this book examines the role of ethical decision making in the practice of engineering. In particular, the book considers the design and development of the main engines of the space shuttle as a paradigm for how individual engineers perceive, articulate, and resolve (...) ethical dilemmas in a large, complex organisation. A series of in-depth case studies show engineers at work on various stages of the project as they balance budgets, deadlines and risks. By documenting the historical development of a single system, the book provides a unique opportunity to explore the complex interactions between political, organisational and technical pressures and engineering and management decisions. (shrink)

On Kejawen Manesges, a Javanese traditional spiritual teachings.

Pedagogy of Life takes its readers through the echoing stories of the half-century, historical Cultural Revolution of China to the literate lifeworld today. Rosa Hong Chen offers a gripping array of personal and kindred stories woven into the power of words and empathy of art through the volutes of writing and dancing for life, expressing genera of warm melancholy, weighty sensations, compulsive sobs, and refrained elation. It is for the existential history of individual lives and communal sharing that life (...) creates a pedagogical condition of possible experiences. Life itself forms a historical and social path of human growth and maturation. In a philosophical and educational autoethnographical inquiry, the author examines the nature of literacy for those marginalized and oppressed; Chen explores how one's name and the ways in which that name is used affect a person's self-knowing and knowing of the world. This book exemplifies the idea that individuals' autobiographical stories are importantly connected to wider cultural, political, and social meaning and understanding. Pedagogy of Life echoes readers' musings, affects, relations, imagination, choice, learning, teaching, and much more, because we, each and all, have our own names, ways of uttering, writing, and dancing, and, ultimately, our own ways of living, knowing, and becoming. (shrink)

In this article, I first propose four guidelines that follow from understanding the project of assigning victims duties to resist oppression as an ameliorative project. That is, if we understand the project to be motivated by the urgent aim of ending or mitigating the harm that oppression imposes on the oppressed, I argue that we should focus on developing and assigning duties that satisfy what I call the ability, weighting, fairness, and overdemandingness guidelines. Second, I develop the duty to be (...) a non-normative individual, which satisfies all four guidelines. (shrink)

Although the problem of adaptiveness plays an important motivating role in her work on human capabilities, Martha Nussbaum never gives a clear account of the controversial concept of adaptive preferences on which she relies. In this paper, I aim both to reconstruct the most plausible account of the concept that may be attributed to Nussbaum and to provide a critical appraisal of that account. Although her broader work on the capabilities approach moves progressively towards political liberalism as time passes, I (...) aim to show that her account of adaptive preferences continues to maintain her earlier commitment to perfectionism about the good. I then distinguish between two obligatory kinds of respect for persons, which I call, respectively, primary and secondary recognition respect. This distinction allows us to see that her perfectionist account of adaptive preferences allows her to show persons primary but not secondary recognition respect. Ultimately, I claim that an acceptable account of adaptive prefer.. (shrink)

What are the functional units of the brain? If the function of the brain is to process information-carrying signals, then the functional units will be the senders and receivers of those signals. Neurons have been the default candidate, with action potentials as the signals. But there are alternatives: synapses fit the action potential picture more cleanly, and glial activities (e.g., in astrocytes) might also be characterized as signaling. Are synapses or nonneuronal cells better candidates to play the role of functional (...) units? Will informational signaling still be the best model for brain function if we move beyond the neuron doctrine? (shrink)

Accounts of adaptive preferences are of two kinds: well-being accounts fully theorized for their own sake and political accounts theorized to facilitate the political project of reducing oppression and marginalization. Given their practical role, the latter are often less fully theorized, and are therefore less robust to theoretical criticism. In this paper, I first draw on well-being accounts to identify the well-theorized elements that political accounts should want to adopt in order to strengthen their project and avoid common criticisms. Second, (...) I appeal to the political project to show the shortcomings of the well-being accounts on which I draw. (shrink)

The use of case-based reasoning in teaching professional ethics has come of age. The fields of medicine, engineering, and business all have incorporated ethics case studies into leading textbooks and journal articles, as well as undergraduate and graduate professional ethics courses. The most recent guidelines from the National Institutes of Health recognize case studies and face-to-face discussion as best practices to be included in training programs for the Responsible Conduct of Research. While there is a general consensus that case studies (...) play a central role in the teaching of professional ethics, there is still much to be learned regarding how professionals learn ethics using case-based reasoning. Cases take many forms, and there are a variety of ways to write them and use them in teaching. This paper reports the results of a study designed to investigate one of the issues in teaching case-based ethics: the role of one’s professional knowledge in learning methods of moral reasoning. Using a novel assessment instrument, we compared case studies written and analyzed by three groups of students whom we classified as: Experts in a research domain in bioengineering. Novices in a research domain in bioengineering. The non-research group—students using an engineering domain in which they were interested but had no in-depth knowledge. This study demonstrates that a student’s level of understanding of a professional knowledge domain plays a significant role in learning moral reasoning skills. (shrink)

If we are to find the criteria for critical analyses of social arrangements and processes not in some abstract, universalist framework, but from the guiding ‘self-interpretations’ of the societies in question, as contemporary contextualist and ‘communitarian’ approaches to social philosophy suggest, the vexing question arises as to where these self-interpretations can be found and how they are identified. The paper presents a model according to which there are four interdependent as well as partially autonomous spheres or ‘levels’ of socially relevant (...) self-interpretation that have to be taken into account equally in order to provide a sound basis for social and political criticism. Thus, it is from the tensions and incoherences between (A) social ideas and doctrines, (B) social institutions and practices, (C) individual beliefs and convictions, and (D) body-practices and habits that social pathologies can be identified and possible solutions can be envisaged. (shrink)

If it is mastery itself which is undergoing deconstruction and if the modern tradition of painting is conventionally recuperated as a tradition of masters, then feminist practice has not surprisingly tended towards the exploration and celebration of its difference(s) at the margins of painting … And yet in this very deconstructive exploration, this celebration of difference, feminist practice reinscribes itself within Tradition and as fundamental to postmodernity. (Phillipson, 1985:188).

The phenomenon of ambiguity aversion, in which risky gambles with known probabilities are preferred over ambiguous gambles with unknown probabilities, has been thoroughly documented in adults but never measured in children. Here, we use two distinct tasks to investigate ambiguity preferences of children (8- to 9-year-olds) and a comparison group of adults (19- to 27-year-olds). Across three separate measures, we found evidence for significant ambiguity aversion in adults but not in children and for greater ambiguity aversion in adults compared to (...) children. As ambiguity aversion in adults has been theorized to result from a preference to bet on the known and avoid the unfamiliar, we separately measured familiarity bias and found that children, like adults, are biased towards the familiar. Our findings indicate that ambiguity aversion emerges across the course of development between childhood and adolescence, while a familiarity bias is already present in childhood. (shrink)

Contingentism depicts normativity as one of our human effective possibilities rather than as a metaphysical bottleneck which we should necessary fulfill. The book is a critical survey of Richard McKay Rorty’s “neo-pragmatism”, in the light of various theoretical arguments as well as of his own resourceful attempts to renew philosophy from within its practice.

In this article, I develop a tension in the capabilities approach between committing to political liberalism and ensuring full capability for all persons. In particular, I argue that the capabiliti...

En este trabajo trataré de mostrar que existe en la obra de Collingwood una unidad si se considera su concepción de la historia y, si bien no creo que algunos cambios en su desarrollo puedan obviarse, me inclino por una lectura que tienda a verlos como modificaciones en sus tesis que, vistas diacrónicamente, permiten reconocer cierta continuidad. Lo que me propongo, entonces, es criticar la interpretación realista de los primeros escritos de Collingwood oponiendo una lectura constructivista que muestre la continuidad (...) teórica entre esos textos y los posteriores, y a la vez intento una defensa del constructivismo histórico de Collingwood frente a las críticas relativistas o escépticas. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo es evaluar la tesis de Ricoeur sobre el reconocimiento en relación con la memoria y la historia. Frente a su afirmación de que el reconocimiento es un “milagro” sólo disponible para la memoria feliz, habremos de analizar si es posible, también, pensar en el reconocimiento para la historia. Para ello confrontaremos las teorías del propio Ricoeur sobre la memoria y el reconocimiento mostrando algunas de sus limitaciones e incongruencias. Finalmente, proponemos un análisis del concepto de (...) “huella” que permitirá vincular historia y memoria con el objetivo de mostrar que en ambas puede darse el reconocimiento. (shrink)