Protein splicing is an extraordinary post‐translational reaction that removes an intact central “spacer” domain (Sp) from precursor proteins (N‐Sp‐C) while splicing together the N‐ and C‐domains of the precursor, via a peptide bond, to produce a new protein (N‐C). All of the available data on protein splicing fit a model in which these intervening sequences excise at the protein level via a self‐splicing mechanism. Several proteins have recently been discovered that undergo protein splicing, and in two such cases, the excised (...) spacer protein is an endonuclease. Such endonucleases are capable of conferring genetic mobility upon the intervening sequences that encodes them. These intervening sequences define a new family of mobile genetic elements that are translated yet remain phenotypically silent by excising at the protein rather than the RNA level. (shrink)

Social order is regulated from above by the law but its foundation is built on norms and customs, informal social practices that enable people to make meaningful and productive uses of their time and resources. Despite the importance of these practices in keeping the social fabric together, very little of the jurisprudential literature has focused on a discussion of these norms and customs. In Social Norms in a Wired World Steven Hetcher argues that the traditional conception of norms as rule-like (...) linguistic entities is erroneous. Instead, norms must be understood as patterns of rationally governed behaviour maintained in groups by acts of conformity. Using informal game theory in the analysis of norms and customs, Hetcher applies his theory of norms to tort law and Internet privacy laws. This book will appeal to students and professionals in law, philosophy, and political and social theory. (shrink)

In the past thirty years, two fundamental issues have emerged in the philosophy of science. One concerns the appropriate attitude we should take towards scientific theories--whether we should regard them as true or merely empirically adequate, for example. The other concerns the nature of scientific theories and models and how these might best be represented. In this ambitious book, da Costa and French bring these two issues together by arguing that theories and models should be regarded as partially rather than (...) wholly true. They adopt a framework that sheds new light on issues to do with belief, theory acceptance, and the realism-antirealism debate. The new machinery of "partial structures" that they develop offers a new perspective from which to view the nature of scientific models and their heuristic development. Their conclusions will be of wide interest to philosophers and historians of science. (shrink)

Recent research highlights the positive effects of organizational CSR engagement on employee outcomes, such as job and life satisfaction, performance, and trust. We argue that the current debate fails to recognize the potential risks associated with CSR. In this study, we focus on the risk of work addiction. We hypothesize that CSR has per se a positive effect on employees and can be classified as a resource. However, we also suggest the existence of an array of unintended negative effects of (...) CSR. Since CSR positively influences an employee’s organizational identification, as well as his or her perception of engaging in meaningful work, which in turn motivates them to work harder while neglecting other spheres of their lives such as private relationships or health, CSR indirectly increases work addiction. Accordingly, organizational identification and work meaningfulness both act as buffering variables in the relationship, thus suppressing the negative effect of CSR on work addiction, which weakens the positive role of CSR in the workplace. Drawing on a sample of 565 Swiss employees taken from the 2017 Swiss Public Value Atlas dataset, our results provide support for our rationale. Our results also provide evidence that the positive indirect effects of organizational CSR engagement on work addiction, via organizational identification and work meaningfulness, become even stronger when employees care for the welfare of the wider public. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Entrepreneurs with social goals face various challenges; insights into how these entrepreneurs experience and appreciate their work remain a black box though. Drawing on identity, conservation of resources, and person–organization fit theories, this study examines how entrepreneurs’ social value creation beliefs relate to their work-related well-being (job satisfaction, work engagement, and lack of work burnout), as well as how this process might be influenced by social concerns with respect to the common good. Using data from the German Public Value Atlas (...) 2015 and 2019 and the Swiss Public Value Atlas 2017, a three-study design analyzes three samples of entrepreneurs in Germany and Switzerland. Study 1 reveals that entrepreneurs report higher job satisfaction when they believe their organization creates social value. Study 2 indicates that these beliefs relate negatively to work burnout; entrepreneurs’ perceptions of having meaningful work mediate this relationship. Study 3 affirms and extends these results by showing that a sense of work meaningfulness mediates the relationship between social value creation beliefs and work engagement and that this mediating role is more prominent among entrepreneurs with strong social concerns. This investigation thus identifies a critical pathway—the extent to which entrepreneurs experience their work activities as important and personally meaningful—that connects social value creation beliefs with enhanced work-related well-being, as well as how this process might vary with a personal orientation that embraces the common good. (shrink)

This study investigates the effect of country-level emancipative forces on corporate gender diversity around the world. Based on Welzel’s theory of emancipation, we develop an emancipatory framework of board gender diversity that explains how action resources, emancipative values and civic entitlements enable, motivate and encourage women to take leadership roles on corporate boards. Using a sample of 6390 firms operating in 30 countries around the world, our results show positive single and combined effects of the framework components on board gender (...) diversity. Our research adds to the existing literature in a twofold manner. First, our integrated framework offers a more encompassing, complete and theoretically richer picture of the key drivers of board gender diversity. Second, by testing the framework empirically, we extend the evidence on national drivers of board gender diversity. (shrink)

This study introduces a human empowerment framework to better understand why some businesses are more socially oriented than others in their policies and activities. Building on Welzel’s theory of emancipation, we argue that human empowerment—comprised of four components: action resources, emancipative values, social movement activity, and civic entitlements—enables, motivates, and entitles individuals to pursue social goals for their businesses. Using a sample of over 15,000 entrepreneurs from 43 countries, we report strong empirical evidence for two ecological effects of the framework (...) components on prosociality. We find that human empowerment lifts entrepreneurs’ willingness to choose a social orientation for their business, and reinforces the gender effect on prosociality in business activity. We discuss the human empowerment framework’s added value in understanding how modernization processes fully leverage the potential of social business activities for societies. (shrink)

A science is an intellectual activity defined by its mechanisms that prevent its scientists from always reaching the conclusions that they set out to reach. Such mechanisms are needed because, if scientists are given full control over what hypotheses they select, what data they discard, and what results they publish, they can communicate any conclusion that they desire. Synthesis, by setting a grand challenge, forces scientists across uncharted territory where they encounter and solve unscripted problems. When theory is inadequate, the (...) synthesis fails, and fails in a way that cannot be ignored. Therefore, synthesis drives discovery and paradigm change in ways that simple hypothesis testing cannot. Here, we describe the discoveries that emerged when synthetic biologists were challenged to create an alternative genetic system that has different molecular structures than DNA and RNA. In pursuit of this particular “grand challenge,” synthesis forced the recognition that the community did not know as much about the double helix as it had constructively assumed. In general, a field of science having access to synthesis as a research strategy can create knowledge even if its practitioners do not fit the ideal of a dispassionate, advocacy-free scientist. (shrink)

All humans laugh. However, there is little agreement about what is appropriate to laugh at. While laughter can unite people by showing how they share values and perspectives, it is also has the power to separate and divide. Humor that "crosses the line" can make people feel excluded and humiliated. This collection of new essays addresses possible ways that moral and ethical lines can be drawn around humor and laughter. What would a Kantian approach to humor look like? Do games (...) create a safe space for profanity and offense? Contributors to this volume work to establish and explain guidelines for thinking about the moral questions that arise when humor and laughter intersect with medicine, gender, race, and politics. Drawing from the work of stand-up comedians, television shows, and ethicists, this volume asserts that we are never just joking. (shrink)

Da Costa and French explore the consequences of adopting a 'pragmatic' notion of truth in the philosophy of science. Their framework sheds new light on issues to do with belief, theory acceptance, and the realism-antirealism debate, as well as the nature of scientific models and their heuristic development.

Distinctions have been proposed between systems of reasoning for centuries. This article distills properties shared by many of these distinctions and characterizes the resulting systems in light of recent findings and theoretical developments. One system is associative because its computations reflect similarity structure and relations of temporal contiguity. The other is "rule based" because it operates on symbolic structures that have logical content and variables and because its computations have the properties that are normally assigned to rules. The systems serve (...) complementary functions and can simultaneously generate different solutions to a reasoning problem. The rule-based system can suppress the associative system but not completely inhibit it. The article reviews evidence in favor of the distinction and its characterization. (shrink)

The novel coronavirus has not only brought along disruptions to daily socio-economic activities, but sickness and deaths due to its high contagion. With no widely acceptable pharmaceutical cure, the best form of prevention may be precautionary measures which will guide against infections and curb the spread of the disease. This study explored the relationship between COVID-19 knowledge, risk perception, and precautionary behavior among Nigerians. The study also sought to determine whether this relationship differed for men and women. A web-based cross-sectional (...) design approach was used to recruit 1,554 participants from all geopolitical zones in Nigeria, through social media platforms using a snowball sampling technique. Participants responded to web-based survey forms comprising demographic questions and adapted versions of the Ebola knowledge scale, SARS risk perception scale, and precautionary behavior scale. Moderated mediation analysis of the data showed that risk perception mediated the association between COVID-19 knowledge and precautionary behavior and this indirect effect was in turn moderated by gender. Results indicate that having adequate knowledge of COVID-19 was linked to higher involvement in precautionary behavior through risk perception for females but not for males. It was also noted that awareness campaigns and psychological intervention strategies on COVID-19 related activities may be particularly important for males more than females. Drawing from the health belief model, we recommend that COVID-19 awareness campaigns should target raising more awareness of the risks associated with the infection to make individuals engage more in precautionary behaviors. (shrink)

Pollution results from humankind’s failure to be good stewards of creation. Guided by Catholic environmental bioethics, Catholic health care organizations have reduced their contribution to this pollution, but they also encounter its human cost. Catholic hospitals treat countless patients sickened by pollution, which most strongly impacts the poor and disenfranchised—those whom the Church expresses a preferential responsibility to care for, in part via the charity care that Catholic health care provides. The poor encounter another cost of pollution: the financial cost (...) of seeking health care, particularly in the US. The authors argue that Catholic health care institutions should take the moral harm of pollution seriously by reducing the financial burden on those sickened by pollution. As an example, they highlight the situation of those sickened by lead exposure in the US and outline how Catholic health care institutions could consider lessening the financial burden of treating this sickness. (shrink)

In this article, the author describes some of his own experiences of becoming an organizational systems theorist. The article also presents overviews of various systems theories that influenced the learning process from subject exploration to mastery. These include system dynamics, management systems, General Systems Theory, self-organizing systems, and autognomics. Additionally, discussions of system failures, philosophical pragmatism, and knowledge management all relate to their influence on systems theories. The article culminates with an examination of the possible causes of system failures and (...) proposes various new ideas for intervening in several large-scale issues, such as sustainability. Finally, there is a review of a new type of organizational performance measurement system known as the adaptive scorecard. (shrink)

During human evolutionary history, there were “trade-offs” between expending time and energy on child-rearing and mating, so both men and women evolved conditional mating strategies guided by cues signaling the circumstances. Many short-term matings might be successful for some men; others might try to find and keep a single mate, investing their effort in rearing her offspring. Recent evidence suggests that men with features signaling genetic benefits to offspring should be preferred by women as short-term mates, but there are trade-offs (...) between a mate's genetic fitness and his willingness to help in child-rearing. It is these circumstances and the cues that signal them that underlie the variation in short- and long-term mating strategies between and within the sexes. Key Words: conditional strategies; evolutionary psychology; fluctuating asymmetry; mating; reproductive strategies; sexual selection. (shrink)

With armed conflict in the Persian Gulf now upon us, Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlanc takes a long-term view of the nature and roots of war, presenting a controversial thesis: The notion of the "noble savage" living in peace with one another and in harmony with nature is a fantasy. In Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage , LeBlanc contends that warfare and violent conflict have existed throughout human history, and that humans have never lived in ecological balance (...) with nature. The start of the second major U.S. military action in the Persian Gulf, combined with regular headlines about spiraling environmental destruction, would tempt anyone to conclude that humankind is fast approaching a catastrophic end. But as LeBlanc brilliantly argues, the archaeological record shows that the warfare and ecological destruction we find today fit into patterns of human behavior that have gone on for millions of years. Constant Battles surveys human history in terms of social organization-from hunter gatherers, to tribal agriculturalists, to more complex societies. LeBlanc takes the reader on his own digs around the world -- from New Guinea to the Southwestern U.S. to Turkey -- to show how he has come to discover warfare everywhere at every time. His own fieldwork combined with his archaeological, ethnographic, and historical research, presents a riveting account of how, throughout human history, people always have outgrown the carrying capacity of their environment, which has led to war. Ultimately, though, LeBlanc's point of view is reassuring and optimistic. As he explains the roots of warfare in human history, he also demonstrates that warfare today has far less impact than it did in the past. He also argues that, as awareness of these patterns and the advantages of modern technology increase, so does our ability to avoid war in the future. (shrink)

Past research has found that skin colouration, particularly facial redness, influences the perceived health and emotional state of target individuals. In the current work, we explore several extensions of this past research. In Experiment 1, we manipulated facial redness incrementally on neutral and angry faces and had participants rate each face for anger and health. Different red effects emerged, as perceived anger increased in a linear manner as facial redness increased. Health ratings instead showed a curvilinear trend, as both extreme (...) paleness and redness were rated as less healthy than moderate levels of red. Experiment 2 replicated and extended these findings by manipulating the masculinity of both angry and neutral faces that varied in redness. The results found the effect of red on perceived anger and health was moderated by masculine face structure. Collectively, these results show that facial redness has context dependent effects that vary based on facial expression, appearance, and differentially impact ratings of emotional states and health. (shrink)

In 2017, Carson and Flood outlined a general duty to be vaccinated, arguing from Catholic social teaching on justice, love, solidarity and the common good. This necessarily relied on assumptions about the typical nature of vaccination, assumptions which do not always hold true in concrete situations. I identify twelve criteria that, where they hold, strengthen the particular duty to be vaccinated, and, if not met, weaken or reverse it. These pertain to the biological agent which vaccination aims to protect against, (...) the vaccine and its supply, the costs and benefits of vaccination to the individual and society, and the alternative courses of action. The two-way relationship between the moral duty to be vaccinated and vaccine mandates is discussed. Individuals and policy-makers need to know these criteria – and be provided the necessary information to evaluate vaccination against them – in order to make a truly rational judgement. (shrink)

Steven French and Decio Krause examine the metaphysical foundations of quantum physics. They draw together historical, logical, and philosophical perspectives on the fundamental nature of quantum particles and offer new insights on a range of important issues. Focusing on the concepts of identity and individuality, the authors explore two alternative metaphysical views; according to one, quantum particles are no different from books, tables, and people in this respect; according to the other, they most certainly are. Each view comes with certain (...) costs attached and after describing their origins in the history of quantum theory, the authors carefully consider whether these costs are worth bearing. Recent contributions to these discussions are analyzed in detail and the authors present their own original perspective on the issues. The final chapter suggests how this perspective can be taken forward in the context of quantum field theory. (shrink)

Finite Transcendence: Existential Exile and the Myth of Home introduces and situates “existential exile” as an experience of the fundamental finitude of human existence and demonstrates how a particular way of responding in faith may enable one to find home in exile. Using the literary and philosophical oeuvre of Albert Camus as a model, this book demonstrates the manner in which mythic literature can both present and engage the condition of exile toward its possible transcendence.

When do descriptive regularities become prescriptive norms? We examined children's and adults' use of group regularities to make prescriptive judgments, employing novel groups that engaged in morally neutral behaviors. Participants were introduced to conforming or non-conforming individuals. Children negatively evaluated non-conformity, with negative evaluations declining with age. These effects were replicable across competitive and cooperative intergroup contexts and stemmed from reasoning about group regularities rather than reasoning about individual regularities. These data provide new insights into children's group concepts and have (...) important implications for understanding the development of stereotyping and norm enforcement. (shrink)

Conceptual features differ in how mentally tranformable they are. A robin that does not eat is harder to imagine than a robin that does not chirp. We argue that features are immutable to the extent that they are central in a network of dependency relations. The immutability of a feature reflects how much the internal structure of a concept depends on that feature; i.e., how much the feature contributes to the concept's coherence. Complementarily, mutability reflects the aspects in which a (...) concept is flexible. We show that features can be reliably ordered according to their mutability using tasks that require people to conceive of objects missing a feature, and that mutability (conceptual centrality) can be distinguished from category centrality and from diagnosticity and salience. We test a model of mutability based on asymmetric, unlabeled, pairwise dependency relations. With no free parameters, the model provides reasonable fits to data. Qualitative tests of the model show that mutability judgments are unaffected by the type of dependency relation and that dependency structure influences judgments of variability. (shrink)

An introduction to the model-theoretic approach in the philosophy of science is given and it is argued that this program is further enhanced by the introduction of partial structures. It is then shown that this leads to a natural and intuitive account of both "iconic" and mathematical models and of the role of the former in science itself.

From beginning to end, the ethical vision of The Good Place is shaped by creator Mike Schur's reading of T.M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other. The characters on The Good Place become better people not because they have figured out a system for getting along with each other. Rather, the moral journey of the characters on The Good Place changes them into fundamentally different people. Levinasian ethics focuses on the encounter with other people and the response to that (...) encounter. For Emmanuel Levinas, the act of preserving an understanding of the world or self is always done at the expense of other people. Contrary to Scanlon, on The Good Place the responsibility for the other is not met in agreement or in respecting disagreement. It is met in the willingness to cede one's place to the other. (shrink)

A normative framework for modeling causal and counterfactual reasoning has been proposed by Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines. The framework takes as fundamental that reasoning from observation and intervention differ. Intervention includes actual manipulation as well as counterfactual manipulation of a model via thought. To represent intervention, Pearl employed the do operator that simplifies the structure of a causal model by disconnecting an intervened-on variable from its normal causes. Construing the do operator as a psychological function affords predictions about how people (...) reason when asked counterfactual questions about causal relations that we refer to as undoing, a family of effects that derive from the claim that intervened-on variables become independent of their normal causes. Six studies support the prediction for causal arguments but not consistently for parallel conditional ones. Two of the studies show that effects are treated as diagnostic when their values are observed but nondiagnostic when they are intervened on. These results cannot be explained by theories that do not distinguish interventions from other sorts of events. (shrink)

We propose a causal model theory to explain asymmetries in judgments of the intentionality of a foreseen side-effect that is either negative or positive (Knobe, 2003). The theory is implemented as a Bayesian network relating types of mental states, actions, and consequences that integrates previous hypotheses. It appeals to two inferential routes to judgment about the intentionality of someone else's action: bottom-up from action to desire and top-down from character and disposition. Support for the theory comes from three experiments that (...) test the prediction that bottom-up inference should occur only when the actor's primary objective is known. The model fits intentionality judgments reasonably well with no free parameters. (shrink)

New and Emerging Science and Technology (NEST) based innovations, e.g. in the field of Life Sciences or Nanotechnology, frequently raise societal and political concerns. To address these concerns NEST researchers are expected to deploy socially responsible R&D practices. This requires researchers to integrate social and ethical aspects (SEAs) in their daily work. Many methods can facilitate such integration. Still, why and how researchers should and could use SEAs remains largely unclear. In this paper we aim to relate motivations for NEST (...) researchers to include SEAs in their work, and the requirements to establish such integration from their perspectives, to existing approaches that can be used to establish integration of SEAs in the daily work of these NEST researchers. Based on our analyses, we argue that for the successful integration of SEAs in R&D practice, collaborative approaches between researchers and scholars from the social sciences and humanities seem the most successful. The only way to explore whether that is in fact the case, is by embarking on collaborative research endeavours. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 12, Page 57-59, December 2011.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction: 'We': The Dangerous Thing -- 1 The Sellarsian Ethical Framework -- 2 Josiah Royce's Philosophy of Loyalty -- 3 Richard Rorty's Quasi-Sellarsian We -- 4 On the Prospects of Redescribing Rorty Roycely -- Bibliography -- Index.

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 31-44, January 2022.

CEO compensation has received much attention from both academics and regulators. However, academics have given scant attention to understanding judgments about CEO compensation by third parties such as investors. Our study contributes to the ethics literature on CEO compensation by examining whether judgments about CEO compensation are influenced by two aspects of a company’s tone at the top—social ties between the CEO and members of the Executive Compensation Committee and the CEO’s Reputation, particularly for financial reporting and disclosures. Although, stock (...) exchanges such as NASDAQ require ECC members to be independent, CEOs still may have social connections to the ECC. In addition, CEOs develop a reputation for the quality of their company’s financial reporting and disclosures. We expect both CEO Social Ties and CEO Reputation to impact say-on-pay judgments, and that fairness perceptions about the CEO compensation will mediate the relationship. We conduct an experiment to test our hypotheses. In this study, we employ a two by two experimental design where we manipulate CEO Social Ties with members of the ECC and CEO Reputation for the quality of financial reporting disclosures . Participants were MBA students who provided a say-on-pay judgment , and judgments about the fairness of the CEO’s compensation. Results indicate that CEO Social Ties affected participants’ say-on-pay judgments, which were fully mediated by their perceptions about fairness of the CEO’s compensation. Further, the CEO’s Reputation also affected participants’ say-on-pay judgments, which were fully mediated by their perceptions about fairness of the CEO’s compensation. Implications for research and public policy are presented. (shrink)