Senior executives in major corporations have drawn attention in recent years for a range of unethical activities. Despite a rise in measures to protect against such lapses, executives still make decisions whether or not to comply with reporting standards, best practices, industry norms and legislation. The prior literature in this area addresses individual characteristics of decision makers and social networks between executives and boards of directors, but to this point has largely overlooked group dynamics of the executive team. Our study (...) addresses this gap and examines the relationship between an occupational community of top executives and the quality of internal control. We construct a unique measure for the executive occupational community based on CEO and CFO’s joint tenure. Our findings show that the number of years of CEO/cfo’s joint tenure is significantly and negatively associated with internal control weakness, suggesting that the longer the executive relationship, the lower the likelihood of internal control weakness. Our study indicates that the presence of an occupational community contributes to better internal control. (shrink)

The criticism that voluntary codes of conduct are ineffective can be met by giving greater centrality to human rights in such codes. Provided the human rights obligations of multinational corporations are interpreted as moral obligations specifically tailored to the situation of multinational corporations, this could serve to bring powerful moral force to bear on MNCs and could provide a legitimating basis for NGO monitoring and persuasion. Approached in this way the human rights obligations of MNCs can be taken to include (...) support for political as well as economic rights. This will go some way towards filling the regulatory gap created by the difficulty of controlling the activities of corporations operating globally. However, such a proposal will require a measure of ‘meta-regulation’ whereby the operations of MNCs are legally required to be sufficiently transparent to create the conditions for effective external moral scrutiny. (shrink)

Science and the originality of life -- Christian facticity -- Grasping life as a topic -- Ruinance -- The retrieval of history -- Facticity and ontology -- Factical speaking -- Rhetoric -- Sophistry.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has faced the challenge of reorienting its foreign policy to address post-Cold War conditions. In this new edition of a groundbreaking work -- one of the first to bring critical theory into dialogue with more traditional approaches to international relations -- David Campbell provides a fundamental reappraisal of American foreign policy, with a new epilogue to address current world affairs and the burgeoning focus on culture and identity in the (...) study of international relations. Extending recent debates in international relations, Campbell shows how perceptions of danger and difference work to establish the identity of the United States. He demonstrates how foreign policy, far from being an expression of a given society, constitutes state identity through the interpretation of danger posed by others. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved. (shrink)

We take rights to be fundamental to everyday life. Rights are also controversial and hotly debated both in theory and practice. Where do rights come from? Are they invented or discovered? What sort of rights are there and who is entitled to them? In this comprehensive introduction, Tom Campbell introduces and critically examines the key philosophical debates about rights. The first part of the book covers historical and contemporary theories of rights, including the origin and variety of rights and (...) standard justifications of them. He considers challenges to rights from philosophers such as Bentham, Burke and Marx. He also examines different theories of rights, such as natural law, social contract, utilitarian and communitarian theories of rights and the philosophers and political theorists associated with them, such as John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, Robert Nozick and Michael Sandel. The second part of the book explores the role of rights-promoting institutions and critically assesses legal rights and international human rights, including the United Nations. The final part of the book examines how philosophies of rights can be applied to freedom of speech, issues of social welfare and the question of self-determination for certain groups or peoples. _Rights: A Critical Introduction_ is essential reading for anyone new to the subject of rights and any student of political philosophy, politics and law. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

This paper inquires into the nature and causes of credulous belief and proposes a way of making negative evidence more salient to believers so that they are less likely to fall into the habit of credulous believing. Contrasting the work of Richard Swinburne with recent work in cognitive psychology, the author argues that for the “strong credulity hypothesis”, namely that our comprehension of testimony is closely linked to an initial (albeit temporary) acceptance of what speakers claim. That is, we are (...) literally “set up” to believe irrespective of whether the belief in question is reasonable. In order to “neutralize” the effect of initial credulity, the author describes a pro/con procedure (suitable for a number of classes, e.g. critical thinking) that allows for the systematic analysis of beliefs and testimony. (shrink)

It is commonplace for undergraduate students to find certain concepts inherent to the disciplines of study troublesome. While some concepts are troublesome simply because they represent new vocabulary for the students, other concepts are troublesome in a more significant sense. Concepts of this kind are troublesome because they highlight an aspect of the deep structure of the discipline, a way of thinking and inquiry, that the students are likely to find strange and even, counter-intuitive, relative to their own pre-existing conceptual (...) frameworks. In this paper, I will argue that the concept of ‘argument’ in the discipline of philosophy, is one such concept. To make the case for this, I will be drawing upon a relatively new and important framework for inquiry into troublesome disciplinary concepts, known as “threshold concept theory” (Meyer and Land 2006, 2008). In addition, I propose to consider the implications, in terms of the design of curriculum and pedagogy for the philosophy classroom, of conceiving argument in threshold concept terms. (shrink)

To 'consequentialise' is to take a putatively non-consequentialist moral theory and show that it is actually just another form of consequentialism. Some have speculated that every moral theory can be consequentialised. If this were so, then consequentialism would be empty; it would have no substantive content. As I argue here, however, this is not so. Beginning with the core consequentialist commitment to 'maximising the good', I formulate a precise definition of consequentialism and demonstrate that, given this definition, several sorts of (...) moral theory resist consequentialisation. My strategy is to decompose consequentialism into three conditions, which I call 'agent neutrality', 'no moral dilemmas', and 'dominance', and then to exhibit some moral theories which violate each of these. (shrink)

The conception of thought as a kind of argumentative dialogue has been influential in curricula designed to promote the development of thinking skills. Educators have sought to “teach” this kind of thinking by providing their students with opportunities to participate in argumentative exchange. This practice is based on the belief that thinking processes will mirror or mimic the interpersonal exchanges in which the thinker engages. In this article, another approach to teaching argumentative thought is developed. It is argued that while (...) training and practice in interpersonal argumentation increases students’ overall argumentation skills, it is not particularly effective in helping students to develop the practice of engaging dialogically with their own beliefs. On this other approach, students are required to engage in “metacognitive inquiry” in which their own judgments in respect of curriculum materials, and in respect of the various strategies they have deployed to generate these judgments, become a subject matter for reflection and critical evaluation. The article concludes with the discussion of an in-class experiment in using the metacognitive approach. (shrink)

Political theorists agree that justice is a fundamental political value but disagree profoundly about its proper analysis and philosophical justification. This substantially revised and updated second edition of Tom Campbell's highly acclaimed and widely used text provides a much-expanded overview of the nature and scope of justice, as well as presenting clear exposition and critiques of the principal contending theorists of most relevance to the contemporary world.

For more than four decades the twin goals of nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament have been an almost unchallenged objective of the “international community.” Like drought prevention, or bans on the use of child soldiers, nonproliferation remains a mostly uncontroversial, largely universalistic initiative to which few object. The proponents of nonproliferation are fond of stressing that the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) has more signatories than any other arms control treaty. Who would not want to prevent more states (...) from obtaining nuclear weapons? And who, for that matter, would oppose the ideal of a world free of such weapons? (shrink)

This paper explores the potential benefits and obstacles in the incorporation of a critical attitude in a critical thinking curriculum. Critical thinking entails more than just the transfer of information and critical thinking concepts to student within a course. The author suggests that professors should exemplify critical traits in the classroom to students as a means to develop a critical attitude or disposition. The adoption of a critical attitude encourages students to ascertain critical concepts and tools, and cultivate a critical (...) disposition, which would further allow students to internalize the insights and values of critical thought and thus be able to readily apply them to arguments. Despite its perceived benefits, the author is also aware of potential roadblocks in the path of developing a students’ critical disposition, such as different epistemic values and upsetting student psychological well-being. Nevertheless, the author contends that adopting a critical attitude provides students and educators with pedagogical tools and goals that enhance the overall effectiveness of critical theory courses. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: L'idée que les images mentales sont des tableaux ou des objets dans l'esprit joue un rôle extrêmement important dans la conception que David Hume se fait de l'esprit et dans sa doctrine générale quant à la nature de la pensée. La question que veut explorer le présent article est la suivante: la doctrine humienne des images mentales comme objets-dans-l'esprit est-elle viable? On soutiendra qu'une défense très forte de la conception de Hume peut être aujourd'hui développée sur la base de (...) données relatives à la nature de l'imagerie mentale qui ont été récemment avancées dans le domaine de la psychologie cognitive. (shrink)

William James has long been recognized as a central figure in the American philosophic tradition, and his ideas continue to play a significant role in contemporary thinking. Yet there has never been a comprehensive exploration of the thought of this seminal philosopher and psychologist. In Experiencing William James, renowned scholar James Campbell provides the fuller and more complete analysis that James scholarship has long needed. Commentators typically address only pieces of James's thought or aspects of his vision, often in (...) an attempt to make the task of understanding James seem easier than it is or else to dismiss him as a philosophically unprepared if well-meaning amateur. The isolated nature of these examinations, too often divorced from the original contexts, badly hinders and even distorts their conclusions. Focusing on James's own ideas rather than his critiques of others, and drawing from a wealth of scholarship that includes the completed editions of his writings and correspondence, Experiencing William James provides an invaluable, comprehensive view of James as he participates in and advances the pragmatic spirit that is at the core of American philosophy. Taking the whole of the man's thinking into account, this book offers the richest perspective so far on this great but not fully comprehended intellectual. (shrink)

It seems a compelling idea that experience of colour plays some role in our having concepts of the various colours, but in trying to explain the role experience plays the first thing we have to describe is what sort of colour experience matters here. I will argue that the kind of experience that matters is conscious attention to the colours of objects as an aspect of them on which direct intervention is selectively possible. As I will explain this idea, it (...) is a matter of being able to use experience to inform linguistic or conceptual thought about what would happen were there to be various interventions on an object. Against this background, I will review Locke’s fundamental argument that since we can change the colour of an almond by pounding it, there must be an error embodied in our ordinary concepts of colour: there is no such thing as intervening directly on the colour of an object. The analysis I present brings out the force of Locke’s argument. But I will propose a vindication of our commonsense conception of colour as an aspect of objects on which direct intervention is selectively possible. (shrink)

The philosopher John J. McDermott comes out of the long American tradition that takes the aim of philosophical inquiry to be interpretation of the open meanings of experience, so that we might all live fuller and richer lives. Here, the authors of these nine essays explore his highly original interpretations of philosophy's various questions about our shared existence. How are we to understand the nature of American culture and to carry forward its important contributions? What is the personal importance of (...) embodiment, of living in the realization of death? How does our physical and personal environment nourish bodies and spirits? What does the deliberate pursuit of a morality offer us? How can we carry forward the fundamental tasks of education to enable those who follow us to use our shared past to address their civic and spiritual problems? What are the possibilities for community? Together, these essays offer a clear, multi-layered understanding of the compelling vision that McDermott has presented over the years. In an Afterword, McDermott responds to the authors' queries and concerns, offering a restatement of his understanding of the American philosopher's task. These essays indicate, and McDermott's response confirms, that for him philosophy is not a purely cerebral activity. Philosophy is, rather, an intellectual means of exploring the fullness of human experience, and it functions best when it operates in the context of the broad sweep of the humanities. Similarly, for McDermott the self is no given substantial entity. On the contrary, it is relational, rooted geographically and socially in its place and its fellows, and damaged when these life-giving processes fail. Further, McDermott does not accept any ultimate canopy of meaning. The human journey is a personal project within which provisional meanings must be created to sustain our advance. (shrink)

in Brian McLaughlin and Ansgar Beckermann (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind (Oxford, Oxford University Press, in press).

Deftly quilting themes of Latin American and feminist liberation theologies with those of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and John Rawls, Alastair V. Campbell displays our rich interconnectedness and our moral responsibilities to one another. Suggesting that many American citizens are oppressed by our current health-care system, he contends that prior to questions of health-care allocation are questions of what we mean as a society by the term health--and how that term is inextricably linked to personal and social freedom (...) and liberation. In the forceful final chapter of the book, Campbell articulates ethical standards for just health-care delivery in the United States--standards that, above all, take account of deep religious faith and concern for one's neighbor. Health as Liberation is a critical analysis of justice and modern health care, and of a society's moral obligations to its citizens. (shrink)

Ethical descriptivism is the view that all ethical properties are descriptive properties. Frank Jackson has proposed an argument for this view which begins with the premise that the ethical supervenes on the descriptive, any worlds that differ ethically must differ also descriptively. This paper observes that Jackson's argument has a curious structure, taking a linguistic detour between metaphysical starting and ending points, and raises some worries stemming from this. It then proposes an improved version of the argument, which avoids these (...) worries, and responds to some potential objections to this version of the argument. (shrink)

The Second World War put an end to America's historical isolationism. Three American thinkers -- Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau, and Kenneth Waltz -- developed a modern strategic framework that sought to introduce Americans to the harsher realities of international politics. Yet even as the United States began to embrace this new Realism, atomic weaponry threatened to make it absurd. This engrossing story of how the three chief architects of a powerful ideology struggled with the implications of their own creation offers (...) crucial context for contemporary debates about the resort to war and weapons of mass destruction. (shrink)

“Descartes on Spontaneity, Indifference, and Alternatives” This essay argues for a “two‐way” compatibilist reading of Descartes on the topic of free will, i.e., Descartes holds that free will is compatible with determinism, and yet also thinks that free will requires a two‐way power to pursue or avoid, and affirm or deny.

This chapter reviews the problem of finding the 'right level' of causal explanation in psychiatry. This is not a purely philosophical problem, but one that frequently arises in practice for psychiatrists. For most scientists, experiment is the crucial test of a causal hypothesis: for X to cause Y is for intervention on X to be reflected in a change in the value of Y. But this kind of approach cannot tell us the right "level" at which to specify the causes (...) of a particular outcome. The natural idea is the right level is one that specifies the 'mechanism' by which Y is produced. But the notion of a "mechanism" in psychiatry is obviously problematic. This chapter attempts to locate the sources of the difficulty here, looking at both a priori and empirical views as to when a "mechanism" has been correctly specified. (shrink)

We explore how principles predicting the success of a medical information commons advantaged or disadvantaged three MIC initiatives in three Canadian provinces. Our MIC case examples demonstrate that practices and policies to promote access to and use of health information can help improve individual healthcare and inform a learning health system. MICs were constrained by heterogenous health information protection laws across jurisdictions and risk-averse institutional cultures. A networked approach to MICs would unlock even more potential for national and international data (...) collaborations to improve health and healthcare. (shrink)

In Better Never to Have Been, David Benatar argues that existence is always a harm. His argument, in brief, is that this follows from a theory of personal good which we ought to accept because it best explains several ‘asymmetries’. I shall argue here that Benatar's theory suffers from a defect which was already widely known to afflict similar theories, and that the main asymmetry he discusses is better explained in a way which allows that existence is often not a (...) harm. (shrink)

Studying the most ethical way to allocate scarce medical resources has been of interest within the last year, due to shortages associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to establish differences between what healthcare providers (HCP) and laypeople consider to be the most ethical way to prioritise the distribution of scarce resources. Healthcare providers ( n = 100) and laypeople ( n = 102) were asked to rank ethical principles from most to least ethical for the allocation of ICU (...) beds in a COVID-19 outbreak, COVID-19 vaccinations and organ transplantation, and the rankings from each scenario across the two groups were compared. Results indicated that HCPs preferred utilitarian principles informed by medical knowledge, such as ‘prognosis’, whereas laypeople preferred less situation-specific and prioritarian principles, such as ‘sickest first’, replicating pre-pandemic findings. Laypeople showed increased in-group agreement when ranking principles, potentially due to the collective experience of the pandemic. Demographic variables such as older age, identifying as Black, Asian or minority ethnic and greater experience with COVID-19, were also associated with a preference for ‘prognosis’. (shrink)

Taking a fundamentally critical approach to the subject of business ethics, this book deals with the traditional material of ethics in business, as well as introducing and surveying some of the most interesting developments in critical ethical theory which have not yet been introduced to the mainstream. Including chapters on different philosophical approaches to ethics, this is a highly structured and clearly written textbook, the first book of its kind on this often neglected aspect of business.

It seems a compelling idea that experience of colour plays some role in our having concepts of the various colours, but in trying to explain the role experience plays the first thing we have to describe is what sort of colour experience matters here. I will argue that the kind of experience that matters is conscious attention to the colours of objects as an aspect of them on which direct intervention is selectively possible. As I will explain this idea, it (...) is a matter of being able to use experience to inform linguistic or conceptual thought about what would happen were there to be various interventions on an object. Against this background, I will review Locke’s fundamental argument that since we can change the colour of an almond by pounding it, there must be an error embodied in our ordinary concepts of colour: there is no such thing as intervening directly on the colour of an object. The analysis I present brings out the force of Locke’s argument. But I will propose a vindication of our commonsense conception of colour as an aspect of objects on which direct intervention is selectively possible. (shrink)