In this paper, I argue that Hume accepts two claims. The first is that it is not possible for a human agent, having adopted an end, to remain committed to it, have it in view, and be indifferent to what he or she acknowledges as the proper means of realizing it, where indifference is the absence of a favoring attitude.1 The second is that, other things being equal, an agent who fails through weak resolve to take the acknowledged means to (...) an acknowledged end violates a norm of practical agency akin to Kant’s hypothetical imperative understood as a command to take the means—that is, to do what has the prospect of realizing the ends one happens to have adopted. I begin with the first claim because some.. (shrink)

The myth of original existence is a story told by many readers of Hume. According to it, the author of the Treatise argues that no passion is unreasonable or contrary to reason on the grounds that passions have no ingredient ideas, and, having no ingredient ideas, are in no position to disagree with or be contrary to the product of reason, belief. While Hume doesn't actually say that passions contain no ideas to provide them with their objects, he does say (...) that "a passion is an original existence... and contains not any representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence". I shall refer to the uninterpreted argument in this passage as The Argument. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 30, Number 1, April 2004, pp. 51-85 Scratched Fingers, Ruined Lives, and Acknowledged Lesser Goods CASS WELLER It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. It is not contrary to reason for me to choose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian, or person wholly unknown to me. (...) It is as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledged lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter. (T 2.3.3.6; SBN 416)1 Everyone is familiar with the cases Hume parades in this passage when he dramatically displays just how far one's preferences and other passions can go without being contrary to reason. His general point is tediously clear. Whatever failing there is in one who prefers the destruction of the world to the scratching of his finger or chooses his total ruin to prevent the least uneasiness of a person wholly unknown to him, it is not a failing of reason, unless this preference and choice involve false suppositions of fact, existence, or mathematics. But they do not according to Hume. So they are not contrary to reason. At the same time, anyone who is given to worrying and fretting over the text will be initially somewhat at a loss to explain in any further detail the nature of the phenomena Hume flaunts as not flouting reason and how they relate to one another. For example, is the notion of preference at work that of a settled judgment of value or that of a blind impulse to be understood only in terms of strength of desire? Is the character Hume inhabits in the first person one who simply finds himself with a blind urge to keep his finger scratch-free or one who Cass Weiler is Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. e-mail: [email protected] 52 Cass Weller has a settled policy of keeping his finger scratch-free viewed as more valuable than anything else. Is preferring my lesser good to my acknowledged greater good the practical counterpart of self-consciously believing that Ï• and not p? Or is it, rather, a common form of weakness? And if so, how is it related to the two previous cases? Although most discussions of Hume's views on practical reason refer to this passage, I know of no extended discussion of the three notorious cases.2 This is no doubt due in part to the fact that the details do not really matter for understanding the main point. A mental state not involving a false belief of experience or a priori reason cannot be contrary to reason.3 Nevertheless, I think it is a good idea to try and figure out just what Hume is saying and that by digging right here we may hope to uncover important aspects of Hume's theory of evaluation, motive, and reason. The task is to get a more detailed view of Hume's own theoretical understanding of the preferences and choices he exhibits as not contrary to reason, in particular whether a preference is an evaluative attitude, and how it may conflict with an acknowledged interest. To this end we will have to go beyond what is adequate for a reader's understanding of the preferences in their narrow rhetorical context. Hume himself invites the reader, inadvertently or not, to look for the wider Humean explanation of preferring one's acknowledged lesser good to the greater by deploying the analogy of a one pound weight's raising a hundred through the advantage of its situation. This idea connects with other passages in the Treatise, as we shall see, in particular with Hume's discussion of the preference for the contiguous over the remote at T 3.2.7 (SBN 534-9). With a clearer view of Hume's understanding of the preferences we will be in a better position to ask about the sort of criticism persons with such preferences are subject to. And, to tip my hand, we will see that Hume... (shrink)

Keyt's analysis of the argument for the imperishability of the soul at _Phaedo (102a-107b10) as well as the author's Plato relies on a causal likeness inference, 'Because of x, F's are F; so x is F'. However, for Keyt the inference occurs at the metaphysical level, so to speak: 'because of some immanent character x, living things are alive so x is alive'. Here x is of the wrong logical type to be predicatively alive. On the author's view, however, the (...) inference occurs at a lower level: 'because of souls, first level individuals that are the subjects of psychological states, living things are alive; so souls are alive'. Here it is still logically possible that souls are predicatively alive. But Plato has not shown that they are. At most he has shown that souls, being predicatively whatever they are, are also by nature eminently alive in Descartes's sense, i.e., are predicatively whatever it takes for them to make living things live. (shrink)

(This book, in Portuguese translation, is an accessible introduction to the philosophy of equality and social justice, with a focus on contemporary theories, especially relational egalitarianism.) -/- O que significa para uma sociedade ser igualitária? A igualdade é amplamente reconhecida como valiosa, seja por cidadãos, políticos, juristas ou filósofos. Ademais, a ideia de igualdade desempenha um papel de grande relevância em muitos movimentos sociais do passado e do presente. Há bastante discordância, porém, acerca de como, exatamente, devemos compreender a natureza (...) e a importância da igualdade. O presente ensaio examina estas questões e apresenta um panorama sumário das mais centrais e influentes abordagens filosóficas à igualdade no quadro de diferentes teorias da justiça, concentrando-se, em particular, na ideia de justiça baseada na igualdade de relações sociais. (shrink)

For multiple reasons, deliberating groups often converge on falsehood rather than truth. Individual errors may be amplified rather than cured. Group members may fall victim to a bad cascade, either informational or reputational. Deliberators may emphasize shared information at the expense of uniquely held information. Finally, group polarization may lead even rational people to unjustified extremism. By contrast, prediction markets often produce accurate results, because they create strong incentives for revelation of privately held knowledge and succeed in aggregating widely dispersed (...) information. The success of prediction markets offers a set of lessons for increasing the likelihood that groups can obtain the information that their members have. (shrink)

In recent years, a distinction between two concepts of equality has been much discussed: 'distributive’ equality involves people having equal amounts of a good such as welfare or resources, and ‘social’ or ‘relational’ equality involves the absence of social hierarchy and the presence of equal social relations. This contrast is commonly thought to have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between equality and justice. But the nature and significance of the distinction is far from clear. I examine several (...) accounts of this issue and argue none are entirely satisfactory. In turn, I offer an alternative proposal. Relational equality, on my account, involves a concern with each person having an equal 'civic status'. I characterize this concern and show it has distinctive and normatively significant positional and temporal aspects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 376-379 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, by Diana de Armas Wilson; 254 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, $74.00. In Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, Diana de Armas Wilson describes and analyzes the link between the birth of the New World in European consciousness and the expression (...) of that consciousness in the novels of Cervantes. Those of us whose teaching includes works from both Peninsular and Spanish American literature have long felt the need for a study that goes beyond a cataloging of Cervantes's references to the world beyond Europe, and those Cervantine scholars among us have variously hinted at and side-stepped the fullness of this issue. As it was with those exemplary figures of the age of exploration she examines, it is to Professor de Armas Wilson's great credit that she has risen to the challenge. Her analysis is well-organized, reasoned, thoughtful, and readable.De Armas Wilson's knowledge of previous and current research in Cervantine studies as well as genre, colonial and postcolonial, and gender studies is impressive. She also admits to participating "in the kinds of critique currently associated with cultural studies, although not without reservations regarding the alleged presentism of that discipline or its tendency to turn primary texts into commodities." I would respond that de Armas Wilson's concerns and techniques in this study are precisely the tools we need to help us define "cultural studies" to our students and to ourselves as scholars of various literatures and cultures.To begin her study, de Armas Wilson mentions many of Cervantes's literary and personal references to geographies, customs, and other contacts with the [End Page 376] world outside Spain. The first chapter, "The Americanist Cervantes," focuses on that material and includes a brief review of recent research--the latest "grande escrutinario" (Don Quijote, Part I, Chapter VI)--regarding what works might have been in Cervantes's library and/or the texts potentially available to him. Professor de Armas Wilson looks at Cervantes's references and the texts available to him through three lenses: imitation, influence, and intertextuality. She sees these methodologies as interdependent and argues that: "the intertextual practices in this book--based on a revised concept of intertextuality that includes the notion of agency and participates in a historical project--are as American as its central topic." (Finding myself in the process of completing this review on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I can only wonder what texts will not be influenced by the "historical project" of this day.)In the second chapter, "The Novel about the Novel," de Armas Wilson surveys Cervantes's status in Continental and Anglo-American criticism, reminding her readers of the polemic between scholars of the ancient novel and those who, bent on refusing to accept the Greco-Roman works as novels, designate them "romances." De Armas Wilson's contention that the Persiles is a "long exemplary novel," is convincingly depicted. Her arguments are based on the fact of the fictional time of the Persiles being within fifty years of the time when Cervantes wrote it, "its self-conscious theorizing, its rationalizing of 'miracles,' and its avowed imitation of Heliodorus' Aethiopica." She is not alone in arguing that Heliodorus' novel is the antithesis of a romance of chivalry. On these bases de Armas Wilson speaks not only to those who may not have recognized the importance of the Persiles because it has been called a romance (an often "despised or despicable" genre), but also to those of us who view consideration of the Persiles essential to an understanding of Don Quijote, if not a key to comprehending the major goals of all of Cervantes's works and his expression of the consciousness of his day.De Armas Wilson continues by arguing for "coevolutionary histories of the novel as alternatives to evolutionary ones." She bases her argument on echoes of widely disseminated accounts of happenings in the New World, (most significantly those of... (shrink)

Centralised, compliance-focused approaches to research ethics have been normalised in practice. In this paper, we argue that the dominance of such systems has been driven by neoliberal approaches to governance, where the focus on controlling and individualising risk has led to an overemphasis of decontextualised ethical principles and the conflation of ethical requirements with the documentation of ‘informed consent’. Using a UK-based case study, involving a point-of-care-genetic test as an illustration, we argue that rather than ensuring ethical practice such compliance-focused (...) approaches may obstruct valuable research. We call for an approach that encourages researchers and research communities—including regulators, ethics committees, funders and publishers of academic research—to acquire skills to make morally appropriate decisions, and not base decision-making solely on compliance with prescriptive regulations. We call this ‘ethical preparedness’ and outline how a research ethics system might make space for this approach. (shrink)

Vous adorez les destinations touristiques de masse? Vous rêvez d'habiter un lotissement pavillonnaire? Les grandes surfaces? Non? C'est normal. Après plusieurs décennies d'uniformisation des paysages et de standardisation de l'imaginaire, l'heure est aux expériences authentiques. Chacun d'entre nous aspire à rencontrer de "vraies personnes", à s'installer dans un quartier qui a une "âme", à voyager "hors des sentiers battus"... Mais alors qu'Airbnb, Instagram, les restaurants à la mode et le marketing de la ville cool s'imposent sur le marché du vrai (...) et industrialisent notre aspiration à vivre des expériences "uniques", comment faire la part des choses entre la promesse d'un nouveau monde - où tout serait authentique - et le spectre d'un nouvel âge du fake? Ce livre tente de répondre au malaise qui touche des générations entières, tiraillées entre l'appel de la modernité et cette course effrénée à l'authenticité. Il aborde la question sous un jour libérateur et décomplexé : et si une identité parodique, ironique et instagrammable était préférable à pas d'identité du tout? (shrink)

Including international contributors from a variety of disciplines - History, English, Information Studies and Archivists – this book does not seek either to applaud or condemn digital technologies, but takes a more conceptual view of how ...

At the heart of some of the most influential strands of philosophical, political, and aesthetic modernism lies the conviction that modernity is fundamentally nihilistic. This book offers a wide-ranging critical history of the concept of nihilism from its origins in French Revolutionary discourse to its place in recent theorizations of the postmodern. Key moments in that history include the concept's appropriation by political activists in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, by Nietzsche in the 1880s, by the European avant-garde and 'high' modernists in the (...) early decades of the twentieth century, by conservative revolutionaries in Germany in the interwar years, and by major theorists in the post-Holocaust period. Focusing in particular on the abiding impact of Nietzsche's claim that art is the 'only superior counterforce' to nihilism, Weller argues that an understanding of modernism (and, indeed, of postmodernism) is impossible without a reflection upon the decisive role played by the concept of nihilism therein. (shrink)

We consider the following problem: Given a proof of the Skolemization of a formula F, what is the length of the shortest proof of F? For the restriction of this question to cut-free proofs we prove corresponding exponential upper and lower bounds.

What is the relationship between fear, danger, and the law? Cass Sunstein attacks the increasingly influential Precautionary Principle - the idea that regulators should take steps to protect against potential harms, even if causal chains are uncertain and even if we do not know that harms are likely to come to fruition. Focusing on such problems as global warming, terrorism, DDT, and genetic engineering, Professor Sunstein argues that the Precautionary Principle is incoherent. Risks exist on all sides of social (...) situations, and precautionary steps create dangers of their own. Diverse cultures focus on very different risks, often because social influences and peer pressures accentuate some fears and reduce others. Instead of adopting the Precautionary Principle, Professor Sunstein argues for three steps: a narrow Anti-Catastrophe Principle, designed for the most serious risks; close attention to costs and benefits; and an approach called 'libertarian paternalism', designed to respect freedom of choice while also moving people in directions that will make their lives go better. He also shows how free societies can protect liberty amidst fears about terrorism and national security. Laws of Fear represents a major statement from one of the most influential political and legal theorists writing today. (shrink)

Hermeneutic theory and the study of Jewish theology : toward a new model of Jewish theological language -- Jewish theology as a religious and doxastic practice -- Forms of theological language in Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael -- Forms of theological language in Franz Rosenzweig's The star of redemption.

In recent years, 'nudge units' or 'behavioral insights teams' have been created in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other nations. All over the world, public officials are using the behavioral sciences to protect the environment, promote employment and economic growth, reduce poverty, and increase national security. In this book, Cass R. Sunstein, the eminent legal scholar and best-selling co-author of Nudge, breaks new ground with a deep yet highly readable investigation into the ethical issues surrounding nudges, (...) choice architecture, and mandates, addressing such issues as welfare, autonomy, self-government, dignity, manipulation, and the constraints and responsibilities of an ethical state. Complementing the ethical discussion, The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science contains a wealth of new data on people's attitudes towards a broad range of nudges, choice architecture, and mandates. (shrink)

Redemption in Judaism is typically thought of as an historical and eschatological category: God has redeemed Israel in the past and will do so again in the future. Although this dipolar understanding of redemption has been dominant in Judaism, forms of actualized redemption have also found expression in which Jews, either individually or communally, secure a positive redemptive status in the present. This article focuses on the peculiar fact that Franz Rosenzweig and Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik both include an actualized component (...) within their theories of redemption. After brief consideration of Kierkegaard as a potential source for their accounts of actualized redemption, I explore how actualized redemption fits into Rosenzweig’s and Soloveitchik’s larger thought and consider their philosophical and theological motivations for conceiving of redemption as achievable. In the concluding section of the paper, I critique Rosenzweig’s and Solovetchik’s accounts of actualized redemption and suggest that Abraham Joshua Heschel’s and Eliezer Berkovits’ alternative theological anthropologies that emphasize the cultivation of holiness circumvent some of the problems I associate with actualized redemption. (shrink)

Transparency is an underpinning of workplace ethics. However, most of the existing research has focused on the relationship between leader transparency and its consequences. Drawing on social and self-regulation theory research, we examine the antecedents of followers’ transparency. Specifically, we propose that followers have higher levels of transparency when they are working with peers who have a high level of transparency. We further suggest that followers’ conscientiousness and agreeableness moderate the relationship between peer transparency and followers’ transparency. Using a time-lagged (...) design, we provide support for the proposed theoretical model. We found that follower conscientiousness substitutes the social regulation effect, while follower agreeableness enhances this social regulation effect. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are also discussed. (shrink)

Many millions of people hold conspiracy theories; they believe that powerful people have worked together in order to withhold the truth about some important practice or some terrible event. A recent example is the belief, widespread in some parts of the world, that the attacks of 9/11 were carried out not by Al Qaeda, but by Israel or the United States. Those who subscribe to conspiracy theories may create serious risks, including risks of violence, and the existence of such theories (...) raises significant challenges for policy and law. The first challenge is to understand the mechanisms by which conspiracy theories prosper; the second challenge is to understand how such theories might be undermined. Such theories typically spread as a result of identifiable cognitive blunders, operating in conjunction with informational and reputational influences. A distinctive feature of conspiracy theories is their self-sealing quality. Conspiracy theorists are not likely to be persuaded by an attempt to dispel their theories; they may even characterize that very attempt as further proof of the conspiracy. Because those who hold conspiracy theories typically suffer from a crippled epistemology, in accordance with which it is rational to hold such theories, the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups. Various policy dilemmas, such as the question whether it is better for government to rebut conspiracy theories or to ignore them, are explored in this light. (shrink)

With respect to questions of fact, people use heuristics – mental short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that generally work well, but that also lead to systematic errors. People use moral heuristics too – moral short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that lead to mistaken and even absurd moral judgments. These judgments are highly relevant not only to morality, but to law and politics as well. Examples are given from a number of domains, including risk regulation, punishment, reproduction and sexuality, and the (...) act/omission distinction. In all of these contexts, rapid, intuitive judgments make a great deal of sense, but sometimes produce moral mistakes that are replicated in law and policy. One implication is that moral assessments ought not to be made by appealing to intuitions about exotic cases and problems; those intuitions are particularly unlikely to be reliable. Another implication is that some deeply held moral judgments are unsound if they are products of moral heuristics. The idea of error-prone heuristics is especially controversial in the moral domain, where agreement on the correct answer may be hard to elicit; but in many contexts, heuristics are at work and they do real damage. Moral framing effects, including those in the context of obligations to future generations, are also discussed. (shrink)

Several philosophers argue for the ‘convergence thesis’ for positional goods: prioritarians, sufficientarians, and egalitarians may converge on favouring an equal (or not too unequal) distribution of goods that have positional aspects. I discuss some problems for this thesis when applied to two key goods for which it has been proposed: education and wealth. I show, however, that there is a variant of the thesis that avoids these problems. This version of the thesis is significant, I demonstrate, because it applies to (...) a person’s status as a citizen, which I suggest is the central concern of social or ‘relational’ egalitarianism. (shrink)

This paper examines the following distinctive republican claims: (1) goodwill and virtuous self-restraint are insufficient to realize freedom; and (2) suitable law is constitutive of freedom. In the contemporary literature, these claims are commonly defended in connection with the conception of freedom as nondomination. This account, however, is often rejected on the grounds that freedom as nondomination is moralized and impossible to realize. In response, I propose that the point of protecting people from domination is better understood not as realizing (...) freedom, but instead as giving persons a civic status as equals. Giving persons a civic status as equals, I claim, realizes an important form of social or 'relational' equality, and I distinguish this aim from giving persons a 'status as nondominated’, as some republicans require. I argue that this account vindicates alternative claims about the insufficiency of goodwill and constitutive importance of suitable law—understood in terms of equality rather than freedom—while avoiding the moralization and impossibility objections. I conclude by suggesting some further advantages of the proposed account versus the standard republican view. (shrink)

This is a compelling if sober set of questions from America's foremost legal scholar."--Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University.

We review the literature on how perceiving an AI making mistakes violates trust and how such violations might be repaired. In doing so, we discuss the role played by various forms of algorithmic transparency in the process of trust repair, including explanations of algorithms, uncertainty estimates, and performance metrics.

Cass Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum bring together an all-star cast of contributors to explore the legal and political issues that underlie the campaign for animal rights and the opposition to it. Addressing ethical questions about ownership, protection against unjustified suffering, and the ability of animals to make their own choices free from human control, the authors offer numerous different perspectives on animal rights and animal welfare. They show that whatever one's ultimate conclusions, the relationship between human beings and nonhuman (...) animals is being fundamentally rethought. This book offers a state-of-the-art treatment of that rethinking. (shrink)

We define a generalization of the first-order cut-elimination method CERES to higher-order logic. At the core of lies the computation of an set of sequents from a proof π of a sequent S. A refutation of in a higher-order resolution calculus can be used to transform cut-free parts of π into a cut-free proof of S. An example illustrates the method and shows that can produce meaningful cut-free proofs in mathematics that traditional cut-elimination methods cannot reach.

The sociomotor framework outlines a possible role of social action effects on human action control, suggesting that anticipated partner reactions are a major cue to represent, select, and initiate own body movements. Here, we review studies that elucidate the actual content of social action representations and that explore factors that can distinguish action control processes involving social and inanimate action effects. Specifically, we address two hypotheses on how the social context can influence effect-based action control: first, by providing unique social (...) features such as body-related, anatomical codes, and second, by orienting attention towards any relevant feature dimensions of the action effects. The reviewed empirical work presents a surprisingly mixed picture: while there is indirect evidence for both accounts, previous studies that directly addressed the anatomical account showed no signs of the involvement of genuinely social features in sociomotor action control. Furthermore, several studies show evidence against the differentiation of social and non-social action effect processing, portraying sociomotor action representations as remarkably non-social. A focus on enhancing the social experience in future studies should, therefore, complement the current database to establish whether such settings give rise to the hypothesized influence of social context. (shrink)

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to provide a commentary to the conceptual article by Norberto Patrignani and Diane Whitehouse, The Clean Side of Slow Tech. This article explores what can be easily overlooked in Information Communication Technology : the uncomfortable truth relating to the production, use and disposal of modern communication technology. Design/methodology/approach – In it, the author picks up on the main ideas that were argued, specifically that there is a need to take a closer look (...) at the production, use and disposal of modern communication technology. Findings – Connecting resource production, use and disposal and its affect on climate change will require those who are in the position to make changes to come up with solutions that also consider values, beliefs and norms that lead to particular types of behaviour. Research limitations/implications – ICT has had an enormous impact on people’s lives. However, there has been primarily focus on its life-accelerating attributes. Slowing down the process of production may open up possibilities for sustainable ICT development. Practical implications – The commentary, combined with Patrignani and Whitehouse’s paper may provide a resource for those responsible in training future ICT professionals. Social implications – If today’s society, and this includes users and producers of ICT, intends to go beyond the mere rhetoric about sustainability, individuals will need to take on a new kind of responsibility that covers the entire life cycle of technology. Originality/value – This commentary is intended to provide an additional viewpoint to the topic of sustainable ICT production. (shrink)

With the widespread infusion of online technology there has been an increase in various studies investigating the practices in online communities including also philosophical perspectives. What those debates have in common is that they call for more critical thinking about the theory of online communication. Drawing on Techno-Anthropological research perspectives, our interest is placed on exploring and identifying human interactions and technology in intersectional spaces. This article explores information systems that allow for interchanges of different users. We discuss ontological assumptions (...) that focus on understanding the kind of dialogue that can be captured between different expert groups when they utilize information systems. We present the notion of ‘dialogic’ by Mikhail Bakhtin and contextualize it through an analysis of online dialogue. Dialogic or ‘conversation and inquiry’ is discussed as being mediated through human relationships. Acknowledging the existence of at least two voices the underlying differences between dialogue partners are highlighted. (shrink)

Background: In the ever-changing and complex healthcare environment, nurses encounter challenging situations that may involve a clash between their personal and professional values resulting in a profound impact on their practice. Nevertheless, there is a dearth of literature on how nurses develop their personal–professional values. Aim: The aim of this study was to understand how nurses develop their foundational values as the base for their value system. Research design: A constructivist grounded theory methodology was employed to collect multiple data sets, (...) including face-to-face focus group and individual interviews, along with anecdote and reflective stories. Participants and research context: Fifty-four nurses working across various nursing settings in Indonesia were recruited to participate. Ethical considerations: Ethics approval was obtained from the Monash University Human Ethics Committee, project approval number 1553. Findings: Foundational values acquisition was achieved through family upbringing, professional nurse education and organisational/institutional values reinforcement. These values are framed through three reference points: religious lens, humanity perspective and professionalism. This framing results in a unique combination of personal–professional values that comprise nurses’ values system. Values are transferred to other nurses either in a formal or informal way as part of one’s professional responsibility and customary social interaction via telling and sharing in person or through social media. Discussion: Values and ethics are inherently interweaved during nursing practice. Ethical and moral values are part of professional training, but other values are often buried in a hidden curriculum, and attained and activated through interactions during nurses’ training. Conclusion: Developing a value system is a complex undertaking that involves basic social processes of attaining, enacting and socialising values. These processes encompass several intertwined entities such as the sources of values, the pool of foundational values, value perspectives and framings, initial value structures, and methods of value transference. (shrink)