Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of the ethical investigation of the emerging practice of people analytics (PA) within human resource (HR) management through charting the development of PA before during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach This paper is designed as a short review of the current thinking in the ethics of PA, a practical journey through the progression of PA across the pandemic and a theoretical exploration of PA through three lenses: virtue ethics, (...) critical social theory and actor network theory. Findings The authors suggest that PA raises novel ethical issues in terms of personal impact, increased penetration into working and home lives and the punch delivered in terms of organisational and behavioural change. Research limitations/implications This study provides a short review of three theoretical approaches to PA. Detailed research and reflection is required to develop and extend an ethics of PA. While engagement with the ethics of PA requires gaining an understanding of the discipline, ideas and jargon of HR management, it is essential that ethicists engage with PA as HR departments take on greater influence and adopt executive roles. Practical implications PA is now at the top of the HR management agenda, but there is limited understanding of the technology, the ethics and the new responsibilities it brings for HR management. This paper raises the profile of an ethical agenda, which practitioners should engage with. Social implications The ethical consequences of PA have social implications as work practices change and hybrid working becomes prevalent. It has the potential to change the relationship between home and the workplace. Originality/value This paper provides a unique synthesis of theory and practice in a new area of ethical importance. (shrink)

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to present a novel mnemonic, ACTIVE, inspired by Mason's 1985 PAPA mnemonic, which will help researchers and IT professionals develop an understanding of the major issues in information ethics.Design/methodology/approach– Theoretical foundations are developed for each element of the mnemonic by reference to philosophical definitions of the terms used and to virtue ethics, particularly MacIntyrean virtue ethics. The paper starts with a critique of the elements of the PAPA mnemonic and then proceeds to develop (...) an understanding of each of the elements of ACTIVE ethics, via a discussion of the underpinning virtue ethics.Findings– This paper identifies six issues, described by the mnemonic, ACTIVE. ACTIVE stands for: autonomy, the ability of the individual to manage their own information and make choice; community, the ethical effect of an information systems on the community which it supports; transparency, the extent to which the derivation of content and process in an information system is made clear; identity, the social and ethical effect of an information system on the definition and maintenance of the distinctive characteristics of a person; value, the value or moral worth placed on information associated with an individual and hence on the relationship with the individual; and empathy, the ability of the information systems professional to emotionally connect with the user and the extent to which the information system distances or connects.Originality/value– The paper applies virtue ethics to developing a tool to help information professionals reflect on their ethical practice in developing and supporting information systems. (shrink)

Little attention has been given to the integral relationship between character strengths and spirituality (the search for or communing with the sacred to derive meaning and purpose). The science of character strengths has surged in recent years with hundreds of studies, yet with minimal attention to spirituality or the literature therein. At the same time, the science of spirituality has steadily unfolded over the last few decades and has offered only occasional attention to select strengths of character (e.g., humility, love, (...) forgiveness) or the universal typology of the VIA Classification of character strengths and virtues. In this exploration, we argue that there is a robust synergy of these sciences and practices revealing that spirituality is vitally concerned with promoting character strengths. At the same time, character strengths can enhance and deepen spiritual practices, rituals, and experiences. We elaborate on how character strengths and spirituality come together in the context of the psycho-spiritual journey toward wholeness. By wholeness, we are referring to a way of being in the world, which involves a life-affirming view of oneself and the world, a capacity to see and approach life with breadth and depth and the ability to organize the life journey into a cohesive whole. We further discuss six levels by which spirituality can be integrated within the VIA Classification, including a meta-perspective in which wholeness represents a meta-strength or superordinate virtue. We frame two pathways of integration: the grounding path, in which character strengths offer tangibility and thereby deepen and enhance spirituality, and the sanctification path, in which spirituality elevates character strengths. Finally, we turn to research-based practices and examine how character strengths might facilitate and contribute to spiritual practices and, conversely, how spirituality might enhance character strength practices. Such multifaceted integration offers insight and wisdom to both areas of study and opens up new directions for psychospiritual research and practices to deepen and broaden our understanding of what it means to be human. (shrink)

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

In this paper, I examine the question of how to nurture and develop conscientiousness thinkers and future citizens of diverse liberal-democratic societies from the perspective of virtue epistemology. More specifically, I examine this question in terms of how public schools might frame engagement with religious perspectives in the classroom. I begin by distinguishing between good and bad conscientiousness through an exploration of current work in the field of virtue epistemology. I then follow Kenneth Strike in his defense of the (...) need for a more robust engagement with religious perspectives as a liberal educational imperative. I argue that basing a framework for engagement on VE, particularly the notion of subjective justification, has significant benefits. My main interest in developing a framework for what I deem to be a necessary supplemental dimension of citizenship education focused on religious engagement is in underlining the responsibility that liberal educators have in regulating what is often a highly contentious and unfortunately caddish debate surrounding religion and the religious. I conclude that by eschewing this responsibility educators are potentially missing out on significant resources for supporting the liberal-democratic educational agenda. (shrink)

This volume concerns the status and ambitions of metaphysics as a discipline.

My aesthetic judgements seem to make claims on you. While some popular accounts of aesthetic normativity say that the force of these claims is third-personal, I argue that it is actually second-personal. This point may sound like a bland technicality, but it points to a novel idea about what aesthetic judgements ultimately are and what they do. It suggests, in particular, that aesthetic judgements are motions in the collective legislation of the nature of aesthetic activity. This conception is recommended by (...) its ability to explain some important but otherwise recondite features of aesthetic practice and, more importantly, by allowing us to ground the normativity of aesthetic judgement in the familiar normativity of practice. It also offers a more systematic way of understanding the rivalry between the ideals of aesthetic universality and diversity. (shrink)

In his postapocalyptic novel, Those Who Remain, G. Michael Hopf (2016) makes an important observation about the effect crises can have on human psychology by noting that "hard times create strong [humans]" (loc. 200). While the catastrophic effects of the recent COVID-19 outbreak are incontestable, there are arguments to be made that the situation itself could be materia prima of a more grounded, and authentic generation of humanity, at least in theory. In this article I draw on Heidegger's early, implicit (...) ethic of finitude as well as his later work surrounding the nature of technology, and place them into dialogue with a global milieu contextualized by worldwide pandemic. I approach this discussion from two different angles: in the first part, I explicate the ethic of finitude, and use it as a framework to describe the observable behavior of communities worldwide in order to better understand how global crises impact the psychical welfare of individual human beings. In the second part, I apply lessons given to us by the later Heidegger, specifically those oriented around the movement away from calculative thinking, in an effort to define a loose, albeit fundamentally ennobling prescriptive aimed at easing the existential strain of the situation we have found ourselves in. *This is a pre-print of an article published in Human Arenas. The final authenticated version is available at DOI: 10.1007/s42087-020-00142-6. (shrink)

This chapter develops and defends an account of reason: to reason is to scrutinize one’s attitudes by consulting the perspectives of other persons. The principal attraction of this account is its ability to vindicate the unique of authority of reason. The chapter argues that this conception entails that reasoning is a robustly social endeavor—that it is, in the first instance, something we do with other people. It is further argued that such social endeavors presuppose mutual respect on the part of (...) those participating in them. The account therefore yields a form of Kantian constructivism: we have an unconditional duty of respect for persons because such a duty is implicit in the very nature of reasoning. -/- . (shrink)

Ryan Wasserman explores a range of fascinating puzzles raised by the possibility of time travel, with entertaining examples from physics, science fiction, and popular culture, and he draws out their implications for our understanding of time, tense, freedom, fatalism, causation, counterfactuals, laws of nature, persistence, change, and mereology.

Including significant passages from The Prince, The Discourses, The Art of War and History of Florence, this illuminating book explores the influence of Machiavelli, who was often reviled as a teacher of evil, on the modern state.

This book is the first comprehensive study of Schopenhauer's philosophy of religion. It develops a contextual account of Schopenhauer's relation to the religions of India by placing his interpretation of their main doctrines within the perspective of his diagnosis of the religious situation in nineteenth-century Europe, and his revised conception of the proper content and methods of metaphysical philosophy in the wake of Kant. It shows that Schopenhauer's encounter with the religions of India was the stimulus for his formulation of (...) a novel theory of a revitalised modern Christianity. The possibility of an oriental renaissance prompted Schopenhauer to argue that Christianity's immanent or ethical teachings needed to be severed from its supernatural or metaphysical doctrines, so that European culture could continue to satisfy the human need for a metaphysical interpretation of the world and life. This book will be of interest to philosophers, theologians, students of religion and modern intellectual history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace StevensTom McBrideThings Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, by Simon Critchley. 137 pp. New York: Routledge, 2005; $22.50.This book—a brief meditation on the poetry of Wallace Stevens and an even shorter one on the cinema of Terrence Malick—might have been a disaster. The author, a philosopher, is sometimes in worried denial that Stevens is an "anti-realist" (...) or a "transcendental realist," and one occasionally senses that in the ancient tension between philosophy and poetry, herding the poets into the philosopher's pen is a bullying way to resolve the conflict. But the book isn't a catastrophe at all; it's a lucid, ruminative, and personable reading of Stevens (and Malick) that even offers a good general guide to the reading of poetry in what Critchley calls "the wake of romanticism" (motto: "God is dead; therefore I am").Critchley's major idea is twofold: that poetry is a therapeutic art form because it slows us down and encourages, about countless subjects, "the whole voluptuousness of looking"; and that Stevens's poetry is informed by a contest between a poetry of "supreme fictions" (in which phenomena come under the [End Page 503] dominion of a potent imagination) and a poetry of "antipodes" (in which phenomena resist the imagination—they "merely are"—and thus reduce the imagination to impotence). Here Critchley affirms a usual view of Stevens as a poet of the weather—another way of saying that he is a modernist with strong roots in the Romantic movement—and he notes that the supreme fiction poems often tend to be set in summer, when the imagination seems especially yeasty, while the antipodean poems tend to be set in winter, when the miserly realness of things seems to rule the earth. In his sensitive and astute reading, however, Critchley remarks upon something else: that in his late poems Stevens seems more overtly metaphysical (Critchely says Stevens is the most philosophically interesting poet of the twentieth century) and that his later poems are set more and more in the seasons of transition (late autumn/early spring). Late in Stevens's career the battle between supreme fictions and antipodes is therefore played out in the same, often overtly philosophical poems. Here Critchley's commentary is at its most astute. Occasional lovers of Wallace Stevens's poetry will remember why they adore his work, and have a better idea why.However, lest readers get the wrong idea, some careful qualifications about the dialectic between Stevens's summer and winter poems are in order. For one thing, the poems of supreme fictions always leave phenomena with their particularity, their ordinariness, their concreteness. To cite one such poem, "Anecdote of the Jar," although the poet imaginatively places "a jar in Tennessee" that makes "the lovely wilderness / Surround that hill," the wilderness' birds and bushes, even the jar itself, remain birds and bushes and jars ("gray and bare"). Here Critchley reinterprets Samuel Taylor Coleridge's distinction between "fancy" and "imagination." Fancy dreams of what does not exist, while imagination transfigures what does. Stevens's poems of supreme fiction are always imaginative, never fanciful.A second qualification: Critchley argues that for Stevens (as well as for a number of philosophers) human ways of knowing are always informed, sooner or later, by the conceptual imagination. In that sense a rose is never just a rose, although we need not become overly fanciful about what a cigar might be. And this leads us to a third one: When readers get to the wintry, antipodean poems—the poems of "anti-poetry"—they will find Stevens suggesting that the only way to view objects without imagination is to imagine what that would be like. Even earlier in his career Stevens became interested in this paradox, as in "The Snow Man" where he muses:One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter [End Page 504] Of the January sun; and not... (shrink)

AI and people do not compete on a level-playing field. Self-driving vehicles may be safer than human drivers, but laws often penalize such technology. People may provide superior customer service, but businesses are automating to reduce their taxes. AI may innovate more effectively, but an antiquated legal framework constrains inventive AI. In The Reasonable Robot, Ryan Abbott argues that the law should not discriminate between AI and human behavior and proposes a new legal principle that will ultimately improve human (...) well-being. This work should be read by anyone interested in the rapidly evolving relationship between AI and the law. (shrink)

Many people find comparisons of the value of persons distasteful, even immoral. But what can be said in support of the claim that persons have incomparable worth? This chapter considers an argument purporting to show that the value of persons is incomparable because it is so great—because it is infinite. The argument rests on two claims: that the value of our capacity for valuing must equal or exceed the value of things valued and that our capacity for valuing is unbounded (...) in a very strong sense. After laying out this argument, I consider its implications for how we should regard each other. In particular, I suggest that it complicates efforts to understand morality as a system of principles. Instead, I propose that an aesthetic attitude, not unlike our experience of the sublime, is an apt response to humanity’s infinite value. -/- . (shrink)

In _Democracy and Education_, John Dewey devotes a chapter to geography and history. McBride reveals that, until recently, he had not thought much about this chapter; geography and history were compulsory topics to be taught to children. In recent years, having read Katherine McKittrick’s _Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle_, McBride has been compelled to think more about geographies of dominance; the ways place, terrain, and geography are imbued with racialized and gendered and hierarchal values, which conspire (...) to create boundaries and exclusions. According to Dewey, learning about the geographies of place and histories of groups of people can enrich our connections to this place and its ecology, make the goals of our people more meaningful, and it can boost our inefficaciousness in our immediate surroundings. Failing this, the knowledge we gain from our elders becomes increasingly detached and meaningless. McBride suggests that Dewey suffered from a form of this estrangement (regarding the tacit racially-white Eurodescended coloniality of North America). McBride suggests that the vast majority of our society can conceive of no future world that is not dominated by Eurodescended peoples and thoroughly infused with their techno-industrial norms and values. If our accounts of the social milieu skirt past the dispossession of the first peoples or the enslavement of Afrodescended peoples or the debilitating effects of heteropatriarchy, then it would appear that we are not terribly critical about our past or our connection to place. It would suggest that we are resigned to (or comfortable within) the Eurodescended norms of this place, unable to see any viable alternatives. In the end, McBride suggests that we accept the Deweyan insight but supplement it with the critical study of geographies of domination and cartographies of struggle. (shrink)

The author reviews the work of select theologians, ethicists, and biblical scholars who suggest that the difference between humans and animals should serve not solely as an ascription of a special status to humans but also as the foundation for a responsibility that humans bear toward animals. As an added reflection, the author explores common categorical differentiations in systematic theology: God and creation, human and nonhuman, elect and non-elect. In the first and last of these categorical differentiations, unique identity entails (...) both a special status and a responsibility. The latter is normatively directed to those who are categorically different. As such, the categorical difference between humans and animals establishes a foundation for moral concern. (shrink)

George Berkeley is one of the greatest and most influential modern philosophers. In defending the immaterialism for which he is most famous, he redirected modern thinking about the nature of objectivity and the mind's capacity to come to terms with it. Along the way, he made striking and influential proposals concerning the psychology of the senses, the workings of language, the aims of science, and the scope of mathematics. In this Companion volume a team of distinguished authors not only examines (...) Berkeley's achievements but also his neglected contributions to moral and political philosophy, his writings on economics and development, and his defense of religious commitment and religious life. The volume places Berkeley's achievements in the context of the many social and intellectual traditions - philosophical, scientific, ethical, and religious - to which he fashioned a distinctive response. (shrink)

When are morally good actions beautiful, when indeed they are? In this paper, it is argued that morally good actions are beautiful when they appear to express the deep or true self, and in turn tend to give rise to an emotion which is characterised by feelings of being moved, unity, inspiration, and meaningfulness, inter alia. In advancing the case for this claim, it is revealed that there are additional sources of well-formedness in play in the context of moral beauty (...) in addition to those that have tended to be focused on to date: one which is connected to imagining a deep location for the goodness concerned, and another which is connected to imagining that the goodness stems from capacities which are essential to the person. (shrink)

Schumpeter took a dim view of the deliberative capacities of the average voter who, he believed, could not be relied upon to make responsible judgements about distant and rather abstract matters of...

Ethics in business is the most urgent problem facing America today. Now two of the best-selling authors of our time, Kenneth Blanchard and Norman Vincent Peale, join forces to meet this crisis head-on in this vitally important new book. The Power of Ethical Management proves you don't have to cheat to win. It shows today's managers how to bring integrity back to the workplace. It gives hard-hitting, practical, ethical strategies that build profits, productivity, and long-term success. From a straightforward (...) three-step Ethics Check that helps you evaluate any action or decision, to the "Five P's" of ethical behavior that will clarify your purpose and your goals, The Power of Ethical Management gives you an immensely useful set of tools. These can be put to work right away to enhance the performance of your business and to enrich the quality of your life. The Power of Ethical Management is no theoretical treatise Peale and Blanchard speak from their own enormous and unique experience, They reveal the nuts and bolts, practical strategies for ethical decisions that will show you why integrity pays. "So Vince Lombardi was wrong. Winning is not the only thing as headlines and hearings from Wall Street to Washington confirm. Now comes a better game plan from the powerful one-two punch of Ken Blanchard and Norman Vincent Peale in a quickreading new book, The Power of Ethical Management. Peale and Blanchard may be the best thing that has happened to business ethics since Mike Wallace invented 60 Minutes. -- JOHN MACK CARTIER Editor-in-Chief Good Housekeeping. (shrink)

What is the nature of the concept BEAUTY? Does it differ fundamentally from nearby concepts such as PRETTINESS? It is argued that BEAUTY, but not PRETTINESS, is a dual-character concept. Across a number of contexts, it is proposed that BEAUTY has a descriptive sense that is characterised by, inter alia, having intrinsically pleasing appearances; and a normative sense associated with deeply-held values. This account is supported across two, pre-registered, studies (N=500), and by drawing on analysis of corpus data. It is (...) suggested that this can help to explain why beauty, unlike prettiness, is thought to be deep in both the sense of being important, and in the sense of being less closely tied to sensory surfaces. (shrink)

The young Hegel was entranced by the notion of intellectual intuition, and this notion continues to entrance many of Hegel’ commentators. I argue that Kant provided three distinct conceptions of an intuitive intellect, that none of these involve aconceptual intuitionism, and that they differ markedly from Fichte’s and Schelling’s conceptions of intellectual intuition. I further argue that by 1804 Hegel recognized that appealing to an aconceptual model, or to Schelling’s model, or to his own early model of intellectual intuition generates (...) inevitable and insoluble problems of question-begging. By incorporating several important points from Kant’s Transcendental Ideal into his reinterpretation of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction and Refutation of Idealism, Hegel’s mature discursive and conceptual account of ‘absolute knowing’ performs some of the functions Kant assigned to the intuitive intellect, though without invoking any such intuitive intellect. I discuss several of these functions. (shrink)

According to the most important objection to the existence of moral beauty, true judgements of moral beauty are not possible as moral judgements require being motivated to act in line with the moral judgement made, and judgements of beauty require not being motivated to act in any way. Here, I clarify the argument underlying the objection, and show that it does not show that moral beauty does not exist. I present two responses: namely, that the beauty of moral beauty does (...) not lie in the moral goodness per se (the “adjacent properties” response); and that only a dispositional motivation to act is required for the moral judgements that are typically made as part of judgements of moral beauty, whereas aesthetic judgements only rule out state motivations to act (the “equivocation of motivation required” response). In addressing the objection, I show how moral beauty is consistent with disinterestedness, and so should be accepted more widely; and also clarify where the beauty in moral beauty resides, and how the moral-aesthetic distinction should be drawn. (shrink)

Schiller says that “it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.” Here I attempt to defend a claim in the same spirit as Schiller’s but by different means. My thesis is that a person’s autonomous agency depends on their adopting an aesthetic identity. To act, we need to don contingent features of agency, things that structure our practical thought and explain what we do in very general terms but are neither universal nor necessary features of agency (...) as such. Without these things, the question of what to do for any individual would be underdetermined. The problem is that adopting such a contingent form of agency amounts to a restriction on what we can do, and so it is a prima facie threat to our autonomy. I will argue that one way, and indeed the only way, of meeting this challenge lies in aesthetic experience. Granting our capacity for aesthetic pleasure the authority to determine the particularities of our agency is compatible with autonomy because doing so means identifying with one’s capacity for pleasure in free and creative activity. Doing this allows us to be both particular sorts of agents and creatures regulated by the universalizing demands of reason. (shrink)