In recent years, character traits in general and virtue-related concepts in particular have been of considerable interest to philosophers, psychological researchers, and practitioners in the business ethics field. Three approaches to character traits can be used to incorporate ethics into organizations: virtues, character strengths, and competencies. The aim of this article is to clarify the concept of character traits, or virtues, and provide a unified operational version of it for incorporation into management. To this end, we first discuss the analogy (...) among virtues, character strengths, and competencies. Then, we propose a list of moral competencies that can be implemented in competency-based human resource management. (shrink)

Current frameworks on ethical decision-making process have some limitations. This paper argues that the consideration of moral competencies, understood as moral virtues in the workplace, can enhance our understanding of why moral character contributes to ethical decision-making. After discussing the universal nature of four moral competencies (prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance), we analyse their influence on the various stages of the ethical decision-making process. We conclude by considering the managerial implications of our findings and proposing further research.

The accuracy of proxies when they interpret advance directives or apply substituted decision-making criteria has been called into question. It therefore became important to know if the Andalusian Advance Directive Form can help to increase the accuracy of proxies' predictions. The aim of this research was to compare the effect of the AADF on the accuracy of proxies' predictions about patients' preferences with that gained from informative and deliberative sessions about end-of-life decision making. A total of 171 pairs of patients (...) and their proxies were randomized to three groups. The control group's answers to the Life Sustaining Preferences Questionnaire were compared with their proxies' answers to the same questionnaire. In one intervention group, the patients had already completed the AADF and given it to their proxies, who used it to guide their own answers to the LSPQ. In the second intervention group, both patients and proxies attended two educative sessions guided by trained nurses and later filled in the LSPQ. Comparisons of accuracy and other variables showed a strong association with the discussion group. The findings show that promoting communication between patients and their proxies improves the accuracy of proxies' predictions much more than isolated use of the AADF form. (shrink)

In the era of information and communication, issues of misinformation and miscommunication are more pressing than ever. _Epistemic injustice - _one of the most important and ground-breaking subjects to have emerged in philosophy in recent years - refers to those forms of unfair treatment that relate to issues of knowledge, understanding, and participation in communicative practices. The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject. The first collection (...) of its kind, it comprises over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, divided into five parts: Core Concepts Liberatory Epistemologies and Axes of Oppression Schools of Thought and Subfields within Epistemology Socio-political, Ethical, and Psychological Dimensions of Knowing Case Studies of Epistemic Injustice. As well as fundamental topics such as testimonial and hermeneutic injustice and epistemic trust, the Handbook includes chapters on important issues such as social and virtue epistemology, objectivity and objectification, implicit bias, and gender and race. Also included are chapters on areas in applied ethics and philosophy, such as law, education, and healthcare. The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice is essential reading for students and researchers in ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, feminist theory, and philosophy of race. It will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as cultural studies, sociology, education and law. (shrink)

The perception of sensory effects generated by one’s own actions is typically attenuated compared to the same effects generated externally. However, it is unclear whether this specifically relates to self-generation. Recent studies showed that sensory attenuation mainly relies on action preparation, not actual action execution. Hence, an attenuation of sensory effects generated by another person might occur if these actions can be anticipated and thus be prepared for.Here, we compared the perceived loudness of sounds generated by one’s own actions and (...) actions of another person that either could or could not be anticipated. We found an attenuation of the perceived loudness for self- as compared to other-generated sounds. This difference was independent of whether the sound-eliciting actions of the other person could be anticipated or not. Thus, sensory attenuation seems to be specifically tied to self-generation instead of being a secondary effect of agent-independent preparation for an upcoming action. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemic side of racial and sexual oppression. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from listening to each other.

The aim of this paper is to conduct an analysis of the application of the specific rules of nanotechnology incorporated in Regulation No. 1223/2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 November 2009 on cosmetic products. It has been ten years since the European Commission had issued its proposal to start the co-decision procedure to create Regulation 1223 of 2009. Although it has been praised for noting the regulatory difference of nanomaterials over the rest of the chemicals, (...) what has been the efficacy of the standard? It is concluded that despite what it meant, the regulation has encountered technical obstacles, thus rendering the objectives relating to nanotechnology that were proposed from the European Commission unfulfilled. This finding is inferred through legal dogmatic methodologies and the identification of nanomaterials that have not been expressly approved. Nevertheless, products incorporating nanomaterials still circulate in the European market. The precepts about nanotechnology in the regulation should be reviewed because technical inconsistencies should be avoided in future regulations or applicable regulations in contexts other than Europe. Such inconsistencies exist with respect to the high level of protection of human health that should be ensured and the provisions intended to protect consumer safety. For instance, the catalog of nanomaterials in circulation does not indicate the materials that have been approved or their toxicological profiles. To date, no comparison studies have been presented between the expectations and legislative objectives set as embodied in the regulation and debated in the European Parliament involving the actual efficacy of this regulation. (shrink)

Law, Economics, and Morality examines the possibility of combining economic methodology and deontological morality through explicit and direct incorporation of moral constraints into economic models. Economic analysis of law is a powerful analytical methodology. However, as a purely consequentialist approach, which determines the desirability of acts and rules solely by assessing the goodness of their outcomes, standard cost-benefit analysis is normatively objectionable. Moderate deontology prioritizes such values as autonomy, basic liberties, truth-telling, and promise-keeping over the promotion of good outcomes. It (...) holds that there are constraints on promoting the good. Such constraints may be overridden only if enough good is at stake. While moderate deontology conforms to prevailing moral intuitions and legal doctrines, it is arguably lacking in methodological rigor and precision. Eyal Zamir and Barak Medina argue that the normative flaws of economic analysis can be rectified without relinquishing its methodological advantages and that moral constraints can be formalized so as to make their analysis more rigorous. They discuss various substantive and methodological choices involved in modeling deontological constraints. Zamir and Medina propose to determine the permissibility of any act or rule infringing a deontological constraint by means of mathematical threshold functions. Law, Economics, and Morality presents the general structure of threshold functions, analyzes their elements and addresses possible objections to this proposal. It then illustrates the implementation of constrained CBA in several legal fields, including contract law, freedom of speech, antidiscrimination law, the fight against terrorism, and legal paternalism. (shrink)

Data are lacking with regard to participants' perspectives on return of genetic research results to relatives, including after the participant's death. This paper reports descriptive results from 3,630 survey respondents: 464 participants in a pancreatic cancer biobank, 1,439 family registry participants, and 1,727 healthy individuals. Our findings indicate that most participants would feel obligated to share their results with blood relatives while alive and would want results to be shared with relatives after their death.

In recent years, after various scandals, the role of auditors has been called into question, even casting doubt on whether their reports reliably reflect the true financial situation of the auditee, especially when this situation is not good. Normative changes in the way auditors have to rate certain questions provide a good opportunity to study this problem. These changes have acquired great relevance among the factors involved in studying audit quality. Thus, the present study analyzed the effect of the normative (...) change that took place in Spain in December 2010, related to opinions modified for going-concern uncertainties. Until that date, the auditor’s uncertainty about the company’s going-concern status led to a qualified opinion. However, under the new regulation, it became an opinion that included an explanatory paragraph stating the reasons for concern, which was considered less serious. In all, 152 small- and medium-sized enterprises that had begun bankruptcy proceedings were studied. Expert systems were used for their analysis, based on classification trees assembled through boosting and bagging. In addition, the logistic regression was used as baseline to compare previous methods. The main result obtained was that a change in the norm that catalogs the going-concern issue as less serious made auditors more likely to report this situation, thus questioning the audit quality. (shrink)

Building mechanisms-based, black box–free explanations is the main goal of analytical sociology. In this article, I offer some reasons to question whether some of the conceptual and methodological developments of the analytical community really serve this goal. Specifically, I argue that grounding our computer modeling practices in the current definition of mechanisms posits a serious risk of defining an ideal-typical research path that neglects the role that the understanding of the generative process must have for a black box–free explanation to (...) be met. I propose some conceptual and methodological alternatives, and I identify some collective challenges that the analytical community should tackle in order not to deviate from its main goal. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemic side of racial and sexual oppression. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from listening to each other.

Abductive problems have been widely studied in propositional logic. First order abduction, however, has been viewed as intractable, for the undecidability of logical consequence. In this paper, we propose a notion of abductive problem, N-abductive problem, which is relative to the cardinality of the minimal model satisfying the given theory. We use a notion of restricted satisfaction, also relative to a domain cardinality. Finally, we propose an effective procedure for the searching of abductive solutions, by means of a modification of (...) Beth's tableaux. (shrink)

This paper studies a distinction that was proposed in previous works between total and partial adjectives. In pairs of adjectives such as safe–dangerous, clean–dirty and healthy–sick, the first (“total”) adjective describes lack of danger, dirt, malady, etc., while the second (“partial”) adjective describes the existence of such properties. It is shown that the semantics of adjective phrases with modifiers such as almost, slightly, and completely is sensitive to whether the adjective is total or partial. The interpretation of such modified constructions (...) is accounted for using a novel scale structure for total and partial adjectives. It is proposed that the standard value of a total adjective is always fixed as the lower bound of the corresponding partial adjective. By contrast, the standard value of partial adjectives can take any point on the partial scale. The effects of this theoretical distinction on the behavior of modified constructions are studied in detail, and their ramifications for the semantic theory of adjectives are discussed. Some other phenomena are surveyed that show evidence for total and partial adjectival constructions with various comparatives and exceptive phrases. (shrink)

The concept of vital force – the immanent energy that promotes the processes of life in the body and in nature – has proved a source of endless fascination and controversy. Indeed, the question of what vitalizes the body has haunted humanity since antiquity, and became even more pressing during the Scientific Revolution and beyond. Examining the complexities and theories about vital force in Spanish modernity, Nicolás Fernández-Medina's Life Embodied offers a novel and provocative assessment of the question of (...) bodily life in Spain. Starting with Juan de Cabriada's landmark Carta filosófica, médico-chymica of 1687 and ending with Ramón Gómez de la Serna's avant-gardism of the 1910s, Fernández-Medina incorporates discussions of anatomy, philosophy, science, critical theory, history of medicine, and literary studies to argue that concepts of vital force served as powerful vehicles to interrogate the possibilities and limits of corporeality. Paying close attention to how the body's capabilities were conceived and strategically woven into critiques of modernity, Fernández-Medina engages the work of Miguel Boix y Moliner, Martín Martínez, Diego de Torres Villarroel, Sebastián Guerrero Herreros, Ignacio María Ruiz de Luzuriaga, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Pedro Mata y Fontanet, Ángela Grassi, Julián Sanz del Río, Miguel de Unamuno, and Pío Baroja, among others. Drawing on extensive research and analysis, Life Embodied breaks new ground as the first book to address the question of vital force in Spanish modernity. (shrink)

This research aims to fill a major gap in the relevant literature on small businesses in developing countries, specifically concerning the development of models to better explain economic and environmental performance as a result of environmental compliance, thus moving toward an explanation of the sustainable behavior of these businesses. Data from 186 pottery craft businesses located in three Mexican states (Oaxaca, Puebla and Tlaxcala) reveal that environmental compliance significantly influences economic and environmental performance, with the mediating role of environmental innovation, (...) confirming the Porter hypothesis in the context of small businesses in an emerging economy. Environmental compliance is an important factor in improving the economic and environmental performance of small businesses in emerging economies. (shrink)

Carmen 4.2 is one of the most commented upon of the odes of Horace. It is indeed a complex poem. To summarize roughly: addressing the young poet Iullus Antonius, Horace presents the dangers of emulating Pindar, offering what seems like a lengthy description as well as an approximation of Pindar's own poetic style . Not as a doomed Icarus imitating the grand Pindaric swan, but in his own preferred mode, like a bee on the banks of Tibur, Horace will (...) continue to produce his own highly refined poems on a small scale . Iullus Antonius, on the other hand, will sing of Augustus’ triumph maiore plectro . Modestly, Horace himself will be content to join in with the popular chants for Augustus’ triumphal return as one happy civilian among the crowd . Iullus Antonius will moreover offer a grand sacrifice of ten bulls and as many cows on that occasion, whereas Horace promises a single bull-calf that he is saving especially for the purpose . I will try to offer a new interpretation of these last two strophes by pointing out an unnoticed allusion to a Hellenistic subtext. (shrink)

Dienes & Perner argue that the explicit representation of an individual to which a property is attributed requires explicit representation of the attributed property. The reasons for this conclusion are similar to the reasons why another of their conclusions may be considered suspect: A property may be explicit without an explicit representation of an individual or the predication of the property to an individual. We question the latter conclusion and draw connections to neurophysiological and cognitive evidence.