Customer citizenship behavior in the online shopping environment is vital to the success of e-retailers. However, it is unclear whether and how service recovery expectation and recovery justice predict customer citizenship behavior in e-retailing settings. Grounded on the expectation confirmation theory and social exchange theory, this study examined the influence of service recovery expectation and recovery justice on customer citizenship behavior with a serial mediation of recovery expectation confirmation and post-recovery satisfaction. A total of 774 samples from e-shoppers with most (...) impressive and most recent service recovery experience were collected to test the hypotheses using structural equation modeling and bootstrapping procedures. This study reveals that service recovery expectation has a negative impact on recovery expectation confirmation, while recovery justice positively affects recovery expectation confirmation, which is further positively correlated with post-recovery satisfaction and customer citizenship behavior. Moreover, recovery expectation confirmation and post-recovery satisfaction play a serial mediation in the relationship between service recovery expectation and recovery justice, and customer citizenship behavior. Our study contributes to the growing body of customer citizenship behavior literature by offering an alternative perspective to understand what encourage or impede customer citizenship behavior, and expands service recovery literature by combining service recovery expectation and recovery justice into a framework and revealing the expectation–confirmation mechanism through which they influence post-recovery satisfaction in online shopping setting. (shrink)

Substantial evidence from experimental studies has shown that mating motivation increases men’s financial risk-taking behaviors. The present study proposed a new moderator, men’s past relationship experience, for this well-accepted link between mating motivation and financial risk-taking tendency. Heterosexual young men were randomly assigned to the mating condition and control condition, and they completed a set of financial risk-taking tasks and reported their past relationship experience. A significant main effect of mating motivation and a significant interaction effect between experimental conditions and (...) relationship experience emerged, suggesting that mating motivation increased financial risk-taking tendency only among men who have never been committed in a romantic relationship, rather than those who have had such experience. This moderating effect was replicated in two experiments. The present study contributed to the understanding of individual differences in the relationship between mating motivation and male financial risk-taking. The present findings also have important implications for financial industry and gambling companies to better target clients and advertise their high-risk products. (shrink)

The massive social change in urban China today has led to a decline in the adaptive implications of shyness for child adjustment, yet evidence of this trend in young children is limited. Moreover, the underlying mechanisms that help to explain the associations between shyness and maladjustment remains poorly understood. The primary goal of the present study was to explore the moderating role of conflict resolution skills in the links between shyness and socio-emotional and school adjustment among urban Chinese preschoolers. Data (...) were collected from 360 children in kindergartens using parent ratings, teacher ratings, and child interviews. The analyses indicated that the relations between shyness and adjustment were moderated by child conflict resolution skills, which served to buffer shy children from adjustment problems. The results were discussed in terms of the implications of conflict resolution skills for early adjustment of shy preschoolers in the Chinese context. (shrink)

Forgiveness interventions benefit victims’ mental health, reduce levels of anger, and promote forgiveness. However, forgiveness interventions are rarely used to improve the offender’s anger and mental health, especially in specific situations such as juvenile correctional facilities. The offender is often also a victim, and reducing the offender’s excessive anger may prevent or decrease the likelihood of future interpersonal violence. This study examined the effects of forgiveness interventions on anger, forgiveness, empathy, and harmony of juvenile delinquents with high levels of trait (...) anger. Eighteen adolescents with trait anger in a juvenile correctional facility volunteered to participate in group counseling. A pretest–posttest method of quasi-experimental design was used, with 8 participants in the intervention group and 10 in the control group; the intervention group received forgiveness group counseling, and the control group did not. The results revealed that the intervention group had significantly higher scores for forgiveness, empathy, and harmony than the control group, although no significant differences in the scores of state and trait anger were found. The forgiveness intervention had significantly improved the levels of forgiveness toward specific perpetrators of childhood victimization for the juvenile delinquents with high levels of trait anger, raising their levels of empathy and harmony; there was no significant increase in trait anger. The findings indicated that forgiveness intervention provides an effective way to improve the positive mental strength of adolescents with high levels of trait anger. (shrink)

This study explores the characteristics of forgiveness in the aging cohorts, which is regarded to be associated with healthy outcomes. Data were drawn from a sample of 308 older adults who completed the forgiveness questionnaire: forgiving others of The Heartland Forgiveness Scale to examine explicit forgiveness, and among the participants, 44 older adults were administrated on the variant single category of implicit association test to examine the implicit forgiveness. The results revealed that there is no correlation between explicit forgiveness and (...) implicit forgiveness of older adults. The result of explicit forgiveness is relatively high while that of implicit forgiveness is relatively low. There was no significant correlation between explicit forgiveness and age, but there was significant difference between age groups, as forgiveness tendency of the elderly had a trough in the age group of 70–79 and then rebounded. Implicit forgiveness was significantly correlated with age, and the difference between age groups was marginal. The forgiveness tendency of the elderly over 80 years old was significantly higher than that of the other two age groups. Gender differences are found in both explicit and implicit forgiveness. The findings indicated that explicit and implicit measures in this study have assessed independent and complementary aspects of forgiveness tendency in older adults. Implicit forgiveness falls behind explicit forgiveness, and true internal forgiveness is difficult and rare in older adults according to data analysis. The trend of explicit forgiveness with age is not obvious, because explicit forgiveness in the middle old age group presents an inflection point. However, implicit forgiveness increases slowly with age. Women excel men in scores obtained with both explicit and implicit measures for forgiveness. (shrink)

Driven by economic and social benefits, social enterprises create new development models that combine wealth creation, social welfare provision, and environmental improvement through innovative approaches. The social entrepreneurship orientation reflects the behavioral tendency to transplant entrepreneurship orientation into the field of social value creation. It is a strategy to balance and integrate economic interests and social interests, which has a significant impact on social entrepreneurship performance. The purpose of this study is to explore the internal mechanism of the impact of (...) social entrepreneurs’ mindfulness upbringing perception on social entrepreneur orientation. To reveal the internal mechanism, we propose a moderated and mediation model of prosocial motivation and perceived pressure from external stakeholders. In this study, random sampling was conducted among social start-ups in China. In order to improve the accuracy of the scale, a pre-survey was conducted before the formal survey. The data analysis results of the pre-survey showed that the scale in this study was suitable for the Chinese context and had good external validity. Through using survey data from social entrepreneurs in China, hierarchical regression analysis and bootstrapping model are adapted to test and verify mediation and moderation effects. The results show that mindfulness upbringing perception indeed positively influences social entrepreneurship orientation directly and partly through the mediating effect of prosocial motivation. Moreover, findings suggest the perceived pressure from external stakeholders negatively moderates not only the relationship between prosocial motivation and social entrepreneurship orientation but also the overall mediation model. This indicates that social entrepreneurs with low perceived pressure from external stakeholders will improve their social entrepreneurship orientation rapidly when their prosocial level is high. Based on these findings, we conclude that social entrepreneurship orientation may be achieved more effectively through the complex process of mindfulness upbringing perception, prosocial motivation, and perceived pressure from external stakeholders. Finally, the study proposes the theoretical and practical implications and suggestions for follow-up research. (shrink)

The role of emotion in human action has long been neglected in the philosophy of action. Some prevalent misconceptions of the nature of emotion are responsible for this neglect: emotions are irrational; emotions are passive; and emotions have only an insignificant impact on actions. In this paper we argue that these assumptions about the nature of emotion are problematic and that the neglect of emotion's place in theories of action is untenable. More positively, we argue on the basis of recent (...) research in cognitive neuroscience that emotions may significantly affect action generation as well as action execution and control. Moreover, emotions also play a crucial role in people's explanation of action. We conclude that the concept of emotion deserves a more distinctive and central place in philosophical theories of action. (shrink)

As an alternative protein product to animal meat, plant-based meat is considered to play an essential role in improving animal welfare and protecting the environment. However, why do a few consumers choose plant-based meat but others do not? Despite the increasing research on plant-based meat marketing, little is known about the psychological mechanism by which plant-based meat marketing affects consumers’ purchasing decisions. We utilize dual-system theory to understand how social media marketing of plant-based meat influences cognitive fluency, customer inspiration, perceived (...) risk, and purchase intention. Four studies show that social media marketing can increase young people’s purchase intention of plant-based meat more than traditional marketing. In Studies 1 and 2, increased intensity of social media marketing can enhance young people’s cognitive fluency and further promote purchase intention. Study 3 explores how cognitive fluency relates to purchase intention through two psychological mechanisms. We suggest that a higher level of cognitive fluency increases customer inspiration and improves purchase intention. However, a lower level of cognitive fluency reduces purchase intention by increasing perceived risk. Study 4 manipulated members’ in-group or out-group status to show a boundary condition for the effect of brand community identity on purchase intention. These studies provide insight into how brand marketers can use social media to promote consumer inspiration and advertising engagement, how managers can offer fluency-increasing mechanisms to ensure a low level of perceived risk, and how enterprise practitioners may want to consider brand community publicity to attract out-group members. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.1 (2002) 1-17 [Access article in PDF] What if the Father Commits a Crime? Rui Zhu Apparently, Socrates and Confucius respond similarly to the question if a son should turn in his father in the case of the father's misdemeanor. When Euthyphro, flaring his pride of his moral impartiality, tells Socrates that he is on his way to report his father because he (...) has thrown one of the household slaves into a ditch and left him bound there until he was dead, Socrates says, "Good Heaven! Certainly, Euthyphro, most men would not know how they could do this and be right. It is not the part of anyone to do this, but of one who is far advanced in wisdom." 1According to Socrates, only a man of high wisdom knows how to prosecute his father righteously, but Euthyphro does not appear to have this wisdom. When his interlocutor observes that an upright man in his state would bear witness against his father if he misappropriates a sheep, Confucius contradicts the interlocutor's understanding of uprightness by speaking in a matter-of-fact tone: "In my country the upright men are of quite another sort. A father will cover up for his son, and a son his father—which incidentally does involve a sort of up—rightness." 2Confucius stands on the same line with Socrates but seems the more radical of the two. Socrates does not directly refute Euthyphro and only suggests that he make sure he understands what he is doing before going any further. Socrates is not only typically Socratic—indirect and suggestive—but also sounds so reasonable that Euthyphro appears in contrast to be a reckless youth who harbors [End Page 1] only a faint understanding of morality. Confucius's response is more rigid, for he categorically dismisses an act of the Euthyphroian kind. He demands that father and son cover up for each other in the case of either one's guilt. Compared to Socrates, Confucius advocates the position that seems a little too strong and leaves no room for justice, while Socrates does not have that problem with justice. This is how we feel about Socrates and Confucius on our first impression. The prima facie observations that we make from the remarks of Socrates and Confucius seem both plain and unproblematic.By embedding these remarks into their respective social or philosophical cultures, this paper will show that our previous observations are not quite accurate. The apparent affinity of the Socratic and Confucian stances belies different underlying moral philosophies. We want to use their comments as bridges to explore the early Greek and Confucian ethics and show how different a picture we see after things are examined within their traditions.The issue of a possible father-son conflict may be treated as a case study of the early Greek (the Heroic era until the age of Socrates) and early Confucian (Confucius and Mencius) morals. There is a strong theme in the early Greek morals that allows, or sometimes demands, a son such as Euthyphro to prosecute his father for the sake of justice, because justice, instead of love (philein) or filial piety, is the governing principle in the early Greek ethics. Confucian ethics is founded on love (human-heartedness), which in turn is extended from the love between father and son. All moral principles including justice are derived from this extension of love. The mutual love of father and son then becomes the governing principle in the case of Confucianism. A Guilty Father: The Greek Motif The question, "What if the father commits a crime?" has a certain realistic aroma to a boy coming of age in the Hesiodic Greek world. That father has to be overcome by son before some relief from strife becomes possible is a familiar theme in Greek literature. In Hesiod's Theogony, Uranus (the sky) incurs hatred from all his newborn children since he hides them in their mother Gaia's womb and does not let them return to the light, for no reason... (shrink)

In this essay I critically examine Daniel Wegner’s account of conscious will as an illusion developed in his book The Illusion of Conscious Will. I show that there are unwarranted leaps in his argument, which considerably decrease the empirical plausibility and theoretical adequacy of his account. Moreover, some features essential to our experience of willing, which are related to our general understanding of free will, moral responsibility and human agency, are largely left out in Wegner’s account of conscious will. This (...) substantially diminishes its implications and significance for some profound philosophical issues. (shrink)

Although previous research has examined the effectiveness of various levels of punitive reactions to misconduct, researchers have given leader leniency relatively inadequate attention. Prior studies consistently suggest the beneficial effects of reacting less punitively toward misconduct. The current research challenges this notion by delineating a mixed effect of leader leniency on subordinate psychological and behavioral reactions. Building on social exchange theory (i.e., reciprocity norm and rank equilibration norm) and motive attribution literature, the authors argue that when subordinates hold high levels (...) of instrumental motive attribution, leader leniency relates positively to subordinate psychological entitlement, which in turn leads to workplace deviance. In contrast, when subordinates develop high levels of value-expressive motive attribution, leader leniency is positively associated with their felt obligation toward leaders, which positively influences their subsequent organizational citizenship behavior. The results of a field study, a scenario experiment, and a recall experiment conducted to test these hypotheses confirm the double-edged effects of leader leniency. These findings have important implications for theory and practice. (shrink)

Given the severity of today’s environmental issues, companies are increasingly making green concepts a key component of their operational strategies. As an essential complement to corporate environmental strategy, employees’ green behavior has received attention from all sectors of society. Based on resource conservation theory, this study explores the formation mechanism of employees’ green behaviors in enterprises starting from two green management tools: green human resource management practices and green transformational leadership. Through two-stage questionnaire research, 296 sample data points were obtained, (...) and the research hypotheses were tested by using linear regression analysis. The results showed that green HRM practices in enterprises enhance employees’ green mindfulness and thus stimulate their green behaviors and that green transformational leadership and green self-efficacy play a positive moderating role in the above relationship. These results support the applicability of resource conservation theory in green management and suggest that green HRM practices and green transformational leadership can be used together in the process of green management. (shrink)

This study examines whether an acquirer’s pre-announcement corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement can provide an insurance-like effect to preserve acquirer returns during the announcement of an acquisition event. Drawing on stakeholder theory and signaling theory, we posit that CSR engagement accrues positive moral capital for an acquirer and sends a positive signal indicating the acquirer’s altruism, both of which temper stakeholders’ negative responses and prevent a reduction in market returns around the announcement of an acquisition. However, high-CSR engagement could backfire (...) when the acquirer makes a hostile takeover announcement. Incongruent signals between high-CSR engagement and the hostile practice are a sign of hypocrisy in the eyes of stakeholders, which can worry investors and hurt acquirer returns. By analysing 1310 acquisition transactions from 2002 to 2012, the results of our event study show that high-CSR acquirers generally enjoy positive acquirer returns during their acquisition announcements, but negative returns when the acquisitions are hostile. These findings support the idea that CSR engagement can provide insurance-like benefits during an event that is often seen as “negative”, while also identifying signal incongruence as an important boundary condition. (shrink)

Zero-shot learning is dedicated to solving the classification problem of unseen categories, while generalized zero-shot learning aims to classify the samples selected from both seen classes and unseen classes, in which “seen” and “unseen” classes indicate whether they can be used in the training process, and if so, they indicate seen classes, and vice versa. Nowadays, with the promotion of deep learning technology, the performance of zero-shot learning has been greatly improved. Generalized zero-shot learning is a challenging topic that has (...) promising prospects in many realistic scenarios. Although the zero-shot learning task has made gratifying progress, there is still a strong deviation between seen classes and unseen classes in the existing methods. Recent methods focus on learning a unified semantic-aligned visual representation to transfer knowledge between two domains, while ignoring the intrinsic characteristics of visual features which are discriminative enough to be classified by itself. To solve the above problems, we propose a novel model that uses the discriminative information of visual features to optimize the generative module, in which the generative module is a dual generation network framework composed of conditional VAE and improved WGAN. Specifically, the model uses the discrimination information of visual features, according to the relevant semantic embedding, synthesizes the visual features of unseen categories by using the learned generator, and then trains the final softmax classifier by using the generated visual features, thus realizing the recognition of unseen categories. In addition, this paper also analyzes the effect of the additional classifiers with different structures on the transmission of discriminative information. We have conducted a lot of experiments on six commonly used benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that our model outperforms several state-of-the-art methods for both traditional as well as generalized zero-shot learning. (shrink)

The Organization Department of the Communist Party of China announced the Opinions on Further Regulation on Party and Political Leaders and Cadres Working Part-Time in Enterprises to force the resignation of government officials holding the position of independent director in listed companies. This paper empirically examines the impact of the GID resignation on firm performance using a difference-in-differences model, which is an exogenous event with a “natural experiment.” The study finds that after the promulgation of the Opinions, firms that lose (...) some of their political resources and their corporate performance decreases significantly compared to firms that do not experience GID resignations. A good external governance environment, while somewhat weakening, is not sufficient to offset the negative impact of the loss of political resources on firm performance. This paper further explores the mechanism by which the GID resignation affects firm performance: one important way in which the resignation of GIDs cause the loss of political resources on which the firm's development depends is that the loss of the firm's tax benefits after GID resignation directly leads to a decline in performance; it also leads to a reduction in the firm's financial subsidy income and a reduction in the amount of bank loans, but both of these do not have a significant effect on the decline in firm performance. The study suggests that GIDs play more of a resource-providing “official” role than an “independent director's” supervisory and advisory role in Chinese listed companies. The findings of this paper reveal the phenomenon of “Political-Business Spin” in China, which has some implications for developing countries, represented by China, to improve the independence of the board of directors and the corporate governance. (shrink)

In this essay I critically examine Daniel Wegner’s account of conscious will as an illusion developed in his book The Illusion of Conscious Will (MIT Press, 2002). I show that there are unwarranted leaps in his argument, which considerably decrease the empirical plausibility and theoretical adequacy of his account. Moreover, some features essential to our experience of willing, which are related to our general understanding of free will, moral responsibility and human agency, are largely left out in Wegner’s account of (...) conscious will. This substantially diminishes its implications and significance for some profound philosophical issues. (shrink)

In a recent article, Arthur Applbaum contributes a new view—legitimacy as a moral power—to the debate over the concept of political legitimacy. Applbaum rejects competing views of legitimacy, in particular legitimacy as a claim-right to have the law obeyed, for mistakenly invoking substantive moral argument in the conceptual analysis, and concludes that “at the core of the concept—what legitimacy is” is only a Hohfeldian moral power. In this article, I contend that: (1) Applbaum’s view of legitimacy, when fully unfolded, refers (...) to more than a mere moral power and should therefore be rejected even by his own standards; (2) Applbaum’s rejection of competing views of legitimacy ultimately relies on a claim that he does not successfully defend, namely, the claim that moral duties are of absolute rather than prima facie force. (shrink)

本书是学习马克思主义哲学史的参考书。书中对学习19世纪和当代马克思主义中存在的40个疑难问题进行了系统的整理和研究。.

PurposeThe aim of this study was to investigate and compare impulsiveness, negative emotion, cognitive function, and P300 components among gamma-hydroxybutyrate -addicted patients, heroin-dependent patients, and methadone maintenance treatment subjects.MethodsA total of 48 men including 17 GHB addicts, 16 heroin addicts, 15 MMT subjects, and 15 male mentally healthy controls were recruited. All subjects were evaluated for symptoms of depression, anxiety, impulsiveness, and cognitive function through the Patient Health Questionnaire, the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item, the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale version II, the (...) Beijing version of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, the behavioral test, and event-related potential P300 detection.Results The mean scores of BIS-II in the GHB addiction group, heroin dependence group, and MMT group were significantly higher than those of the HC group. The total scores of BJ-MOCA in GHB addiction group was the worst among the four groups, followed by heroin addiction, MMT group and HC group. The response time in the GHB addiction group was the longest among the four groups, followed by the heroin addiction, MMT, and HC groups. The amplitude and latency of P300 in GHB addiction subjects were significantly lower and longer than those of the MMT group and the HC group. For the three types of addiction, the P300 amplitudes at Fz, Cz, Pz, T5, and T6 were negatively correlated with the scores of GAD-7, PHQ-9, and BIS-II; the P300 latencies were positively correlated with the response time and negatively correlated with the scores of the BJ-MoCA.ConclusionPeople with an addiction were likely to have increased impulsiveness. The cognitive function of the GHB and heroin-addicted subjects, including the heroin detoxification and the MMT groups, was severely impaired, especially for the GHB-addicted patients. The impairment manifested as abnormalities of BJ-MoCA, response time, and P300 components. (shrink)

Noise in behavior is often viewed as a nuisance: while the mind aims to take the best possible action, it is let down by unreliability in the sensory and response systems. How researchers study cognition reflects this viewpoint – averaging over trials and participants to discover the deterministic relationships between experimental manipulations and their behavioral consequences, with noise represented as additive, often Gaussian, and independent. Yet a careful look at behavioral noise reveals rich structure that defies easy explanation. First, both (...) perceptual and preferential judgments show that sensory and response noise may potentially only play minor roles, with most noise arising in the cognitive computations. Second, the functional form of the noise is both non-Gaussian and non-independent, with the distribution of noise being better characterized as heavy-tailed and as having substantial long-range autocorrelations. It is possible that this structure results from brains that are, for some reason, bedeviled by a fundamental design flaw, albeit one with intriguingly distinctive characteristics. Alternatively, noise might not be a bug but a feature: indeed, we suggest that noise is fundamental to how cognition works. Specifically, we propose that the brain approximates probabilistic inference with a local sampling algorithm, one that uses randomness to drive its exploration of alternative hypotheses. Reframing cognition in this way explains the rich structure of noise and leads to a surprising conclusion: that noise is not a symptom of cognitive malfunction but plays a central role in underpinning human intelligence. (shrink)

The digital business model emerges as a new business model and gradually penetrates global industries, and countries are putting in place various digital strategies to support their development. As one of the important tools, taxation strategies are highly expected by countries, which not only describe the economic development pattern of a country but also show the digital leadership of a country. Some countries have introduced their own unilateral digital services tax to govern their digital business models, while others have looked (...) more to the global minimum tax, resulting in the current situation of both a unilateral digital services tax and a global minimum tax. However, both of them are of great reference value for the tax governance of digital business models. This paper compares the development history of digital tax strategies, categorizes, and analyzes the design logic of existing digital tax strategies, and takes China, one of the major digital economy countries, as an example to propose China’s digital tax strategies by drawing on international experience. We set an example for the design of digital economy tax strategies for countries around the world so that they can manage digital business models more efficiently. (shrink)

The ultimate aim of artistic exploration is to explore the claim that objects are different from experience and beauty is just a by-product of the exploration. In other words, the truth in the eyes of each person may quite literarly not be the same. A typical example is that some art archaeologists attribute the artistic achievements of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cezanne to their eye diseases.1 Saying this, however, is somewhat unreliable—just like we could not arbitrarily say that the (...) world in the eyes of animals, who have a completely different physciological and optic nerve structure, is quite diferent from that of humans. This indicates that differences in the visual apparatus influence the viewing body’s .. (shrink)

As one of the three systems of China's traditional culture, Daoism has an important place in the history of Chinese philosophy. Based on the ideas of inaction performing all, the Way modeling spontaneity, and the dialectic of you [having, being] and wu [lacking, nonbeing], this article is a systematic exploration of Laozi's philosophy of denial, spontaneity, and atheism, as well as of the deep and lasting influence of his metaphysical principles on all schools of traditional Chinese philosophy.

We reply to Andrew Sneddon’s recent criticism of the causal theory of action (CTA) and critically examine Sneddon’s preferred alternative, minimal causalism. We show that Sneddon’s criticism of CTA is problematic in several respects, and therefore his conclusion that “the prospects for CTA look poor” is unjustified. Moreover, we show that the minimal causalism that Sneddon advocates looks rather unpromising and its merits that Sneddon mentions are untenable.

This study focuses on the static output feedback control of nonlinear Markov jump singularly perturbed systems within the framework of Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy approximation. From a practical point of view, the phenomenon of asynchronous switching between the plant and the controller is considered and characterized by a finite piecewise-homogenous Markov process. Particularly, for facilitating the controller synthesis, the closed-loop system is transformed into a fuzzy Markov jump singularly perturbed descriptor system by adopting descriptor representation. In order to fully accommodate the system (...) features, an appropriate stochastic Lyapunov function is constructed. Afterwards, by combining Finsler’s lemma, the mean square exponential admissibility of the system is analyzed. The conditions ensuring the existence of the predesigned controller are given and further solved by designing a brief search algorithm. Finally, a typical circuit system is used to demonstrate the application potential of the developed control technology and the effectiveness of the control strategy. (shrink)

In nontheistic moral traditions, there is a typical ethical conundrum concerning the relation between cosmic order and human agency. Within those traditions, it is generally recognized that the universe has its own order and history that are independent of human will. A moral discourse has to find space to accommodate human agency in the midst of the iron grid of cosmic law. Both Confucius and Aurelius use the concept of timeliness (kairos) to resolve the difficult issue. But their philosophies take (...) on divergent paths. By studying their resolutions of the issue, we will be able to appreciate the distinctive nature of their nontheistic moral narratives. (shrink)