In a postmodern culturism, everything is relative, in this way, nothing can be affirmed as absolute truth. Taking into account that culturism is the belief that some cultures are superior than others, this essay proposes the idea that a postmodern culturism is the belief, superior to others, that all cultures are to be revered. Within a postmodern culturism, the essay proposes the analysis of three common arguments through a specific epistemological perspective, rationalism: empirical data and the primacy of reason. The (...) analyzed arguments are: first, all cultures ought to be equally revered; second, western logic is different to the ancestral logic; third, all ancestral cultures have wisdom. The article concludes that these arguments do not withstand the rational analysis. (shrink)

The focus of Norton's book is the distinction between objectives and values in developing environmental policies. Norton argues that environmentalism is a coalition of many groups working toward common objectives, but unlike other social action movements the environmental coalition does not have shared moral principles.

Philosophers often find themselves in disagreement with contemporary philosophers they know full well to be their epistemic superiors on the topics relevant to the disagreement. This looks epistemically irresponsible. I offer a detailed investigation of this problem of the reflective epistemic renegade. I argue that although in some cases the renegade is not epistemically blameworthy, and the renegade situation is significantly less common than most would think, in a troublesome number of cases in which the situation arises the renegade is (...) blameworthy in her disagreement with recognized epistemic superiors. I also offer some thoughts on what it would mean for philosophical practice for us to refrain from being renegades. Finally, I show how a new kind of radical skepticism emerges from modest theses regarding the renegade. (shrink)

I contrast two roles for environmental philosophers—“applied philosophy” and “practical philosophy”—and show that the strategy of applied philosophy encourages an axiological and monistic approach to theory building. I argue that the mission of applied philosophy, and the monistic theory defended by J. Baird Callicott, in particular, tends to separate philosophers and their problems from real management issues because applied philosophers and moral monists insist that theoretical exploration occurs independent of, and prior to, applications in particular situations. This separation of theory (...) and practice suggests that philosophers are likely to be effective in policy discussions only to the degree that they can offer unquestioned theories that adjudicate real problems. Callicott offers his monistic, ontological approach as universal guidance to environmental activists and decision makers, arguing that ecosystems and communities are moral subjects that can “own” their own inherent value. Callicott’s theory, however, faces a crucial, unanswered theoretical dilemma which illustrates the impossibility of the dual task Callicott has set for his theory—to provide a single, ontological unification of ethics under nonanthropocentric holism and to capture the fine nuances of ethical obligations as experienced in varied communities. I also show that monistic assumptions have led to an unfortunate interpretation ofAldo Leopold’s land ethic and that a pluralist and pragmatist direction is likely to provide a more efficacious and theoretically defensible direction for further study of environmental philosophy in a more practical mode. (shrink)

For years philosophers argued for the existence of distinct yet materially coincident things by appealing to modal and temporal properties. For instance, the statue was made on Monday and could not survive being flattened; the lump of clay was made months before and can survive flattening. Such arguments have been thoroughly examined. Kit Fine has proposed a new set of arguments using the same template. I offer a critical evaluation of what I take to be his central lines of reasoning.

In this paper, we explore the impact of individualism and collectivism on three basic aspects of ethical decision making - the perception of moral problems, moral reasoning, and behavior. We argue that the inclusion of business practices within the moral domain by the individual depends partly upon individualism and collectivism. We also propose a pluralistic approach to post-conventional moral judgment that includes developmental paths appropriate for individualist and collectivist cultures. Finally, we argue that the link between moral judgment and behavior (...) is related to individualism and collectivism. (shrink)

This paper examines the impact of the level of economic development, income inequality, and five cultural variables on the rate of software piracy at the country level. The study finds that software piracy is significantly correlated to GNP per capita, income inequality, and individualism. Implications for anti-piracy programs and suggestions for future research are developed.

We all can identify many contemporary philosophy professors we know to be theists of some type or other. We also know that often enough their nontheistic beliefs are as epistemically upstanding as the non-theistic beliefs of philosophy professors who aren’t theists. In fact, the epistemic-andnon-theistic lives of philosophers who are theists are just as epistemically upstanding as the epistemic-and-non-theistic lives of philosophers who aren’t theists. Given these and other, similar, facts, there is good reason to think that the pro-theistic beliefs (...) of theistic philosophers are frequently epistemically upstanding. Given their impeccable epistemic credentials on non-theistic matters, the amount of careful thought that lies behind their theism, the large size of the community of philosophical theists, as well as other, similar facts, it would be surprising if all or even most of their pro-theistic beliefs were epistemically blameworthy in some or other signicant sense tied to charges such as ‘He should know better than to believe that’ (so mere false belief need not be blameworthy in this sense; the use of ‘blameworthy’ will be claried below). Of course some of the pro-theistic beliefs of some theistic philosophers are epistemically blameworthy; the mere large numbers of fallible theistic philosophers almost guarantees it. My point here is that it would be unexpected if most of the pro-theistic beliefs of theistic philosophers were epistemically blameworthy. (shrink)

This report highlights and explores five questions that arose from the workshop on sensory substitution and augmentation at the British Academy, March 26th through 28th, 2013.

The relationship of corporate social responsibility to risk management has been treated sporadically in the business society literature. Using real options theory, I develop the notion of corporate social responsibility as a real option its implications for risk management. Real options theory allows for a strategic view of corporate social responsibility. Specifically, real options theory suggests that corporate social responsibility should be negatively related to the firm’s ex ante downside business risk.

In contemporary sociology, there has been significant interest in the idea of mobility, the decline of the nation state, the rise of flexible citizenship, and the porous quality of political boundaries. There is much talk of medicine without borders and sociology without borders. These social developments are obviously linked to the processes of globalization, leading some to argue that we need a `sociology beyond society' in order to account for these flows and global networks. In this article, I propose an (...) alternative analysis. There are important developments involving the securitization of modern societies that create significant forms of immobility. One striking illustration is the increasing use of walls to quarantine or secure territories and communities against outsiders or to regulate the flow of migrants in Israel, in Europe and along the Mexican-US border. Modern societies are in particular characterized by a deep contradiction between the economic need for labour mobility and the state's political need to assert sovereignty. Gated societies, ghettoes, quarantine zones, prisons, camps and similar arrangements are in many respects pre-modern institutions of spatial regulation for political ends. Contemporary technical developments in biomedicine offer new opportunities for political control and spatial regulation in terms of forensic policing, bio-tattooing and bioprofiling. Globalization paradoxically produces significant forms of immobility for political regulation of persons alongside the mobility of goods and services. (shrink)

We provide an intuitive motivation for the hyperreal numbers via electoral axioms. We do so in the form of a Socratic dialogue, in which Protagoras suggests replacing big-oh complexity classes by real numbers, and Socrates asks some troubling questions about what would happen if one tried to do that. The dialogue is followed by an appendix containing additional commentary and a more formal proof.

Business and society research has increasingly moved from the margins to the mainstream. Although this progression has benefited from advances in empirical research, the field continues to suffer from considerable methodological challenges that hamper its development. In this introductory article to the special issue, we review how far our field has come in advancing methods and methodologies in business and society research. We also highlight the methods and methodologies covered by the contributors to this special issue and how they help (...) address key shortcomings in our field. Finally, we suggest some promising research methodologies that can address important business and society research challenges going forward. (shrink)

This is an excerpt from a report on the Sensory Substitution and Augmentation Conference at the British Academy in March of 2013. This portion of the report explores the question: Does sensory substitution generate perceptual or cognitive states?

This is an excerpt from a report on the Sensory Substitution and Augmentation Conference at the British Academy in March of 2013. This portion of the report explores the question: How does sensory substitution interact with the brain’s architecture?

This is an excerpt from a report on the Sensory Substitution and Augmentation Conference at the British Academy in March of 2013. This portion of the report explores the question: What can sensory substitution tell us about perceptual learning?

This is an excerpt from a report on the Sensory Substitution and Augmentation Conference at the British Academy in March of 2013. This portion of the report explores the question: What are the limitations of sensory substitution.

Increasingly research in the field of business and society suggests that ethics and corporate social responsibility can be profitable. Yet this work raises a troubling question: Is it ethical to use ethics and social responsibility in a strategic way? Is it possible to be ethical or socially responsible for the wrong reason? In this article, we define a strategy concept in order to situate the different approaches to the strategic use of ethics and social responsibility found in the current literature. (...) We then analyze the ethics of such approaches using both utilitarianism and deontology and end by defining limits to the strategic use of ethics. (shrink)

Some philosophy – Wittgenstein's would be an example – is written in clear sentences, yet most people find it obscure at a first reading. This is because the prime location of clarity in philosophy is not sentences but structures. Only if a reader can relate what he is currently reading to a wider framework does he know where he is. Coherent utterance in all discursive media – not only language but mathematics, for example, or music – possesses two kinds of (...) structure at the same time. In this article these are distinguished, and their radically different relationships with language shown. In the process, the commonest causes of unclarity are also identified. (shrink)

The sociology of language has been concerned primarily with the use of language in everyday interactions, resulting in important theoretical contributions, particularly to conversation analysis. In responding to Simon Susen’s “Bourdieusian reflections on language: Unavoidable conditions of the real speech situation”, which emphasizes the inherent “sociality” of symbolic forms, this article directs attention to an important location of language, namely to its role in public rituals or liturgies. Looking at the history of the Book of Common Prayer within the framework (...) of symbolic violence, this article examines the power struggles over public rituals that over time came to shape the very notion of “Englishness” through shared, if contested, liturgical worship. (shrink)

Abstract:This article defines and analyzes the nature of a trust relation. It specifically examines the internal and external morality of trust relations and the ethical limits of those relations. It examines both the ends pursued by trust relations as well as the means by which trust is developed. It shows that the ends need to be evaluated by traditional ethical theories, while the ethical constraints of the trust process depend upon the specific bases of trust. In addition, the consequences of (...) the trust process differ in their impact on the trustor and third parties. Despite the popularity of trust in the literature, this study recommends caution in the use of trust as an ethical basis for economic organization. The optimal form of trust, although still subject to limitations, is fairness-based trust. (shrink)

The concept of generation has had little refinement and application in recent sociology. After reviewing the literature, this article modifies Mannheim's original conceptualization through Bourdieu's notion of habitus, with the aim of providing a framework for the comparative study of generations. To this end, generation is defined as a cohort of persons passing through time who come to share a common habitus, hexis and culture, a function of which is to provide them with a collective memory that serves to integrate (...) the cohort over a finite period of time. (shrink)

Many highly educated people think religious belief is irrational and unscientific. If you ask a philosopher, however, you'll likely get two answers: most religious belief is rational in some respects and irrational in other respects. In this essay I explain why they think religious belief is rational. In a sequel essay I explain why they think the very same beliefs are irrational.

We applaud Sedlakova and Trachsel’s work and their description of conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) as possessing a hybrid nature with features of both a tool and an agent (Sedlakova and...

This article makes a contribution to the on-going debates about universalism and cultural relativism from the perspective of sociology. We argue that bioethics has a universal range because it relates to three shared human characteristics,—human vulnerability, institutional precariousness and scarcity of resources. These three components of our argument provide support for a related notion of ‘weak foundationalism’ that emphasizes the universality and interrelatedness of human experience, rather than their cultural differences. After presenting a theoretical position on vulnerability and human rights, (...) we draw on recent criticism of this approach in order to paint a more nuanced picture. We conclude that the dichotomy between universalism and cultural relativism has some conceptual merit, but it also has obvious limitations when we consider the political economy of health and its impact on social inequality. (shrink)

This is an essay written for students regarding how to write a philosophy paper.

This paper views corruption as a form of contracting amenable to analysis from the viewpoint of transaction-cost economics. Concepts such as transaction, bounded rationality, opportunism, and asset specificity are shown to apply to cases of corruption. Both market and parochial corruption are hypothesized to vary in accordance with changes in the specificity of assets invested to support the corruption transaction. Evidence from a number of different studies tends to support the hypothesized relation. The implications of the transaction-cost perspective are developed (...) for policy makers and directions for future research are suggested. (shrink)

This paper views corruption as a form of contracting amenable to analysis from the viewpoint of transaction-cost economics. Concepts such as transaction, bounded rationality, opportunism, and asset specificity are shown to apply to cases of corruption. Both market and parochial corruption are hypothesized to vary in accordance with changes in the specificity of assets invested to support the corruption transaction. Evidence from a number of different studies tends to support the hypothesized relation. The implications of the transaction-cost perspective are developed (...) for policy makers and directions for future research are suggested. (shrink)

In this article, we examine the relationship of the multinational firm’s market environment, stakeholders, resources, and values to the development of strategic social planning and strategic social positioning. Using a sample of multinational enterprises in Mexico, we examine the relationship of these different ways of conducting social strategy to the creation of value by the firm. The market conditions of munificence and dynamism, and the resource for continuous innovation are found to be related to strategic social positioning. The social responsibility (...) orientation of the firm is related to strategic social planning. Positioning is related to value creation for the multinational firm, but planning is not. We discuss the implications of these findings for research and practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:The history of the practice of corporate social responsibility has largely been limited to the twentieth century, with a focus on the United States. This paper provides a brief introduction to CSR practice from the nineteenth century through World War I in the United Kingdom, United States, Japan, India, and Germany. The relevance of nineteenth-century CSR to current debates and research regarding the motivations for CSR, the business cases for CSR, stakeholder management, political CSR, industry self-regulation, and income inequality are (...) also discussed. (shrink)

Despite the appeal of the stakeholder concept, little work had been done with respect to the development of specific structures for the management of stakeholder relations. This paper draws upon the organizational justice literature to demonstrate how many of its concerns coincide with those of the stakeholder management literature. It shows that organizational justice can provide specific advice for the design of stakeholder relations, while stakeholder theory can broaden the scope of current inquiries into organizational justice.

This material object, my body, is no different in the constitution of its matter from the rest of the physical universe. And my knowledge of it uniquely from inside has led us to the conclusion that what in its outer nature is matter in motion is, in its inner nature, activity of will. This puts into my hand the key to understanding the inner nature of the world: the whole empirical world, what we have called the phenomenal, appears to be (...) matter in motion, but in its hidden inner nature it is will. The noumenal will, however, is unknowable, not self‐experiencing but a blind, purposeless force, such as moves the galaxies. In keeping with this, in human beings it is the Unconscious. (shrink)

This article argues that tattooing and body piercing in modern societies cannot be naively innocent acts; such activities cannot recapture primitiveness, because they take place within a social context, where social membership is not expressed through hot loyalties and thick commitments. Body marks in primitive society were obligatory signatures of social membership in solidaristic groups, wherein life-cycle changes were necessarily marked by tattooing and scarification. Modern societies are metaphorically like airport departure lounges where passengers are encouraged to be cool and (...) distant, orderly and regulated. The article is thus critical of recent attempts to discover and unearth Dionysian moments of creative tribalism in modern youth groups or working-class communities. Body marks are commercial objects in a leisure marketplace and have become optional aspects of a body aesthetic, which playfully and ironically indicate social membership. They cannot serve as charismatic entrance points to the primitive. (shrink)

Norbert Elias (2001) produced one of the most influential theories on the history of violence in human societies in terms of ‘the civilizing process’. With the transformation of feudalism, the rise of bourgeois society and the development of the modern state, interpersonal violence was increasingly regulated by social norms that emphasized self-restraint and personal discipline. His theory was a moral pedagogics of the body in which the ‘passions’ are self-regulated through detailed social regimes. While his theory is influential, it has (...) also been the subject of systematic criticism. I examine three obvious lacunae in Elias’ theory. First, his theory does not provide an adequate account of the role of religion in the civilizing process, particularly with respect to controlling human violence, and I examine Elias’ theory through a commentary on charisma and the sacred in human society, namely the role of sacred violence. Second, Elias had relatively little to say about the interaction between military technology and interpersonal norms. Modern technology has made it possible, both in peace and war, for the state and modern military institutions to gain control of forms of mass violence that were unimaginable in less civilized societies. We could accept Elias’ proposition about constraint in terms of interpersonal violence, but argue that modern technology has obviously enhanced the capacity of the means of violence in society. This ‘de-personalization’ of violence is consistent with aspects of Elias’ civilization theory. However, the theme of technology was completely understated. Third, apart from Elias’ interest in art and society as a consequence of his teaching appointment in Ghana (1962–4), his theory was primarily concerned to explain aspects of social change in European society. An exploration of the evolution of military violence and charisma among American Plains Indians, especially the Cheyenne, is intended as an elaboration of the debate around Elias’ ‘figurational sociology’. Through an examination of the training of warriors in nomadic Plains culture, their mode of warfare is defined as a form of spiritual violence, because warfare was bound up with religious norms of conduct and their military interaction was highly ritualized. These spiritual technologies are an important illustration of military technologies of self-creation. My account concludes with an examination of the nature of modern conflict between professional armies within an international human rights framework. The democratization of warfare results in the routinization of military charisma and the charismatic hero survives primarily in popular culture as a celebrity. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the likelihood that recent conventions against corruption signed by the OECD and the OAS will be effective in Latin America. It begins by looking at the cultural context of corruption in Latin America and examines efforts by Latin American signatories to implement both agreements. It then evaluates the extent to which these efforts will prove successful. It concludes with suggestions for the development of culturally sensitive policies that will be effective in the fight against corruption in Latin (...) America. (shrink)

In this compelling book, John B. Davis examines the change and development in Keynes's philosophical thinking, from his earliest work through to The General Theory, arguing that Keynes came to believe himself mistaken about a number of his early philosophical concepts. The author begins by looking at the unpublished 'Apostles' papers, written under the influence of the philosopher G. E. Moore. These display the tensions in Keynes's early philosophical views, and outline his philosophical concepts of the time, including the concept (...) of intuition. Davis then shows how Keynes's later philosophy is implicit in the economic argument of The General Theory. He argues that Keynes's philosophy had by this time changed radically, and that he had abandoned the concept of intuition for the concept of convention. The author sees this as being the central idea in The General Theory, and looks at the philosophical nature of this concept of convention in detail. (shrink)

Max Weber is a dominating presence in western sociology, but his legacy remains a matter of considerable controversy. His influence is felt in the philosophy of social science, in theories of class, status and power, and of course in the various substantive areas where he had a lasting impact. However this article argues that his comparative studies of religion form the core of both substantive and theoretical interests. Firstly the interpretation of his oeuvre is skewed towards by excessive attention to (...) the Protestant Ethic thesis, which was in fact only two essays that explored an issue that was already well known in German academic circles. Secondly Weber’s contribution to the study of Axial Age religions has only recently received adequate attention. The Axial Age religions emerging between 800 and 200 BCE created the foundations of the world religions through the idea of transcendence and developed a critical view of the everyday empirical world. Thus I argue that more attention should be given to his view of the interface between politics and religion. Weber pessimistically concluded that the world is dominated by ‘unbrotherliness’ and that the ethic of brotherly love in the major religions had come to nothing. (shrink)

Max Weber discussed Islam in various places in his sociology of religion, but there was no sustained or systematic commentary unlike his other work on the religions of China and India. What he did have to say about Islam was, even by the standards of his own analysis of value neutrality, judgmental. Subsequently his sociology of Islam has been criticized as Orientalist. While he provided positive interpretations of Protestant inner-worldly asceticism and Old Testament prophecy as radical and charismatic, his commentaries (...) on Islam were by contrast negative and critical. He regarded Islam as a warrior religion in which the salvation drive was turned away from the individual soul and the energy of the Muslim community was directed towards imperial conquest. His arguments did not for example provide a valid account of how Islam spread peacefully in South and South East Asia through Sufi traders. The article however notes an ironic justification for Weber’s analysis through the growth of urban ascetic piety in so-called post-Islam. Finally the article, turning away from Weber’s focus on economic ethics of the world religions, argues that Weber’s work is better understood as an ethical reflection on the perennial conflict between religion (the ethic of absolute ends) and politics (the ethics of responsibility). (shrink)