In an increasingly urbanized world, construction industry is called upon to serve the needs of human society, such as environmental protection and safety in terms of infrastructure. In this context, a sustainable and ethical development means a close connection between buildings and environment. This connection can be achieved through, for example, the concept of ecological concrete or green concrete, as it is often called. The conventional process of obtaining cement and mineral aggregates from the concrete composition generates pollution, especially through (...) greenhouse gas emissions. Also, one should not ignore the fact that extraction of the raw materials affects the habitats of the sites and of the neighboring areas. When construction materials are questioned, the ethical issues lay not in the means of expression, but mainly in the means of production. More to the point, the present contribution aimed to find solutions for enhancing the adhesion of vegetal aggregates with the cement matrix, in order to obtain a material with optimal mechanical properties, which is valued as an ethical approach of building industry. Results showed that plant aggregates can be used to obtain a building material which can be improved by using partial substitution of cement by silica fume, fly ash, or by using additives and that green concrete as an environmentally friendly material offers the alternative for lower energy use and fewer CO2 emissions. Marketers must understand not only the advantages of these green materials, but also that they have an ethical commitment to provide consumers with environmentally friendly materials. (shrink)

Hinduism is above all a way of life and a philosophy of life. Looking more closely, we can see that in India life and religion are inseparable. The objective of this paper is to analyze the influences of religion, in time, on the economic growth of India, a continuously changing country. The Indian economy is an economy of contrasts due to its caste system and its legal aspects that govern the society and which have been imposed since ancient times. After (...) analyzing the Hindu culture and civilization and seeing the impact of religion in the social sphere, we can say that, indeed, Hinduism represents a part of the socio-economic system, a way of life. This country was contemporary with the glory of Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome and it saw all of them disappear. No doubt that it is hiding a secret in its way of life and in its spirituality. The secret of life without death, which India knows, results from the primacy of the spirituality. (shrink)

Mihaela Miroiu, The road towards autonomy. Feminist Political Theories Polirom, Iasi, 2004.

Adolescents who believe that their parents treat them differently from their siblings have poorer psychosocial well-being than otherwise. This phenomenon, which is known as parental differential treatment or PDT occurs in up to 65% of families. Past studies have examined socio-demographic variables (e.g., child gender, age, and birth order) as predictors of PDT, but these immutable characteristics do little to inform interventions and help these adolescents. Hence, this study extends past research by investigating links among parent empathy, parent perception of (...) PDT, child perception of PDT, child perception of fairness and child well-being (self-esteem, depression, anxiety, and trust in the relationship with parents). Furthermore, this study tests whether adolescent personality (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism), child empathy, and child perception of fairness moderate these links. This study will utilize a two-wave longitudinal design with a one-year lapse. Data will be collected from 760 Chinese adolescents studying from Secondary One to Secondary Three in 18 schools in Hong Kong and from their parents. We test our theoretical model via a multilevel structural equation model. This study both addresses (a) theoretical debates about relations among empathy, PDT, fairness, and psychosocial well-being and (b) focuses on modifiable factors and behaviors, to inform future interventions, such as parent education. (shrink)

En este artículo se quiere mostrar cómo el bien la verdad y la belleza, al ser propiedades que se identifican con el ser, es decir, trascendentales, develan algunas características del ser perfecto en los entes imperfectos. Esto es posible desde el pensamiento de Tomás de Aquino, porque dios, que es aquel que crea, al hacerlo transmite algo de su propio ser a su obra; así como el artista se refleja en algún respecto en su creación. En el caso de dios, (...) este reflejo se llama vestigio, y tiene carácter analógico. Sin embargo, permite que una criatura racional encarnada pueda descubrirlo por medio de la contemplación del universo, lo que transforma a la creación en un fenómeno ierofánico. En este trabajo mostraremos cómo cada trascendental revela un aspecto de la divinidad. La verdad la hace inteligible, la bondad deseable y la belleza digna de ser amada. (shrink)

This article highlights how Internet and new media are experienced by Romanian Seventh-Day Adventist pastors in their ministry. What is the acceptance of Web 2.0 services for neo-Protestant pastors of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, what uses of these technologies they make in their work, what is their mobilization for the appropriation of an innovative culture in the daily pastoral work, how these uses allow them to manage their religious activity, these are the main questions of a survey we conducted in (...) 2016 to shed light on uses of digital technologies by Romanian Seventh-Day Adventist pastors. (shrink)

Este trabajo busca analizar los personajes que Tácito destaca como dignos de mérito durante el nuevo sistema político del Principado y que reciben una alabanza o elogio por parte del historiador en la primera héxada de sus _Anales. _Se examinan también los factores que se constituyen como meritorios bajo el reinado de Tiberio y que reciben algún tipo de compensación política por parte del emperador.

During the last decade there has been burgeoning research concerning the ways in which we should think of and apply the concept of responsibility for Artificial Intelligence. Despite this conceptual richness, there is still a lack of consensus regarding what Responsible AI entails on both conceptual and practical levels. The aim of this paper is to connect the ethical dimension of responsibility in Responsible AI with Aristotelian virtue ethics, where notions of context and dianoetic virtues play a grounding role for (...) the concept of moral responsibility. The paper starts by highlighting the important difficulties in assigning responsibility to either technologies themselves or to their developers. Top-down and bottom-up approaches to moral responsibility are then contrasted, as we explore how they could inform debates about Responsible AI. We highlight the limits of the former ethical approaches and build the case for classical Aristotelian virtue ethics. We show that two building blocks of Aristotle’s ethics, dianoetic virtues and the context of actions, although largely ignored in the literature, can shed light on how we could think of moral responsibility for both AI and humans. We end by exploring the practical implications of this particular understanding of moral responsibility along the triadic dimensions of ethics by design, ethics in design and ethics for designers. (shrink)

Deep learning AI systems have proven a wide capacity to take over human-related activities such as car driving, medical diagnosing, or elderly care, often displaying behaviour with unpredictable consequences, including negative ones. This has raised the question whether highly autonomous AI may qualify as morally responsible agents. In this article, we develop a set of four conditions that an entity needs to meet in order to be ascribed moral responsibility, by drawing on Aristotelian ethics and contemporary philosophical research. We encode (...) these conditions and generate a flowchart that we call the Moral Responsibility Test. This test can be used as a tool both to evaluate whether an entity is a morally responsible agent and to inform human moral decision-making over the influencing variables of the context of action. We apply the test to the case of Artificial Moral Advisors and conclude that this form of AI cannot qualify as morally responsible agents. We further discuss the implications for the use of AMAs as moral enhancement and show that using AMAs to offload human responsibility is inadequate. We argue instead that AMAs could morally enhance users if they are interpreted as enablers for moral knowledge of the contextual variables surrounding human moral decision-making, with the implication that such a use might actually enlarge human moral responsibility. (shrink)

The paper is focused on the process that creates prepositional phrases in Spanish, from the perspective of the theory of grammaticalization and cognitivism, tracking semantic transformations through associative processes such as metaphor and metonymy. After reviewing these theoretical bases, the research follows two particular expressions in the Spanish prepositional phrases inventory: en cabeza de and a la cabeza de. The analysis starts by the study of the central noun, cabeza, in historic dictionaries, followed by a study of their use in (...) the main academic corpus. The aim is to observe how these expressions have changed diachronically to establish when and how they have become fixed phrases in the Spanish language. (shrink)

Inspired by Judith Butler’s critique of Zionism, this article explores one artistic practice that may be considered as developing a diasporic thinking that is specifically rooted in the experience...

The focus on this article is to analyze the concept of beauty in Kierkegaard’s thought, starting from some questions that I try to answer in these pages: How does Kierkegaard understand beauty? What role does beauty play in the inner constitutive process? All this to argue that, as regards beauty, Kierkegaard recovers the Greek concept of kalokagathia to give it a modern interpretation; thus, distancing himself from the modern understanding of beauty as a mere object of study of aesthetics or (...) the mere contemplation of an ideal; beauty is defined as the telos of the inner self and is related to freedom and choice. It is, therefore, as I will argue, an ethical beauty, rather than an aesthetic one. (shrink)

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this paper, a special type of polysemantic words, that is, words with multiple meanings for the same part of speech, are analyzed under the name of neutrosophic words. These words represent the most dif cult cases for the disambiguation algorithms as they represent the most ambiguous natural language utterances. For approximate their meanings, we developed a semantic representation framework made by means of concepts from neutrosophic theory and entropy measure in which we incorporate sense related data. We show the (...) advantages of the proposed framework in a sentiment classification task. (shrink)

Este artículo problematiza la forma en la que el feminismo ha interpretado al escepticismo como una amenaza para su proyecto epistemológico, ético y político, y plantea que, a pesar de dicha interpretación, el escepticismo es inherente a la filosofía feminista y un aliado útil para su proyecto. El problema ha estado en cómo el feminismo ha reducido su comprensión del escepticismo a una versión cartesiana extrema y ha pasado por alto otras corrientes de la tradición —como la de David Hume— (...) que podrían ser fructíferas para promover una actitud crítica y emancipatoria. Muestra así como una alianza entre una comprensión moderada del escepticismo y el feminismo puede brindar las herramientas necesarias para cuestionar formas de dominación patriarcal y poner en marcha investigaciones que combatan la opresión de género. (shrink)

En el presente texto se hace una lectura fenomenológica del relato mítico amazónico del Yurupary. A partir de esta, se defiende la tesis de que en la oralitura que se manifiesta en este relato se ofrece la cosmovisión de una cultura precolombina; en esta, se plasma en su estructura interna una determinada manera de estar-en-el-mundo, es decir, devela rasgos de la dimensión ontológica de la misma. Para exponer la tesis anterior el texto se divide en tres partes: I. “De la (...) fenomenología o presupuestos metodológicos”; II. “Aproximación fenomenológica al relato”, y III. “Perspectivas”. (shrink)

This article analyzes the innovations produced by the concept of experience, introduced from the feminist theory during the eighties. The experience was an epistemic invention to give account of what used to result exceeding, subsidiary, or invisible to the science legitimated as such. This theoretical-methodological tool led to redefinitions around the sense of objectivity and pointed out the political condition of a perspective that was declared as neutral. This work tries to throw some light over the critical strength that this (...) epistemic tool had during those years, for which it chooses the historical perspective. At the same time, this article advances towards a critical analysis around certain modelling of the tool. In this sense, the article aims to sharpen the epistemic surveillance and to review the commitments that this has been acquiring with the institutionalization of the feminist perspective during the last decades. El presente artículo analiza las innovaciones que produjo en el campo del conocimiento la herramienta de la experiencia, introducida desde la teoría feminista en los años ochenta. La experiencia fue una invención epistémica que tuvo como objetivo dar cuenta de aquello que resultaba excedente, subsidiario o invisible a la ciencia legitimada como tal. Este instrumental teórico-metodológico conllevó redefiniciones en torno al sentido de la objetividad y señaló la condición política de una perspectiva declarada neutral. El presente trabajo apunta a alumbrar la potencia crítica que dicha herramienta epistémica tuvo en aquellos años, para lo cual elige la perspectiva histórica. Asimismo, el artículo avanza en un análisis crítico en torno a ciertas modelizaciones contemporáneas de dicha herramienta. En este sentido, el artículo aspira a agudizar la vigilancia epistémica y a revisar los compromisos que ha ido adquiriendo con la institucionalización de la perspectiva feminista de las últimas décadas. (shrink)

This study explored the influence of healthcare ageism on nurses’ moral distress. Episodic interviews were conducted on 25 Romanian nurses in 2020. Thematic analysis revealed that all moral distress sources reported reflected macro-, meso- and micro-level ageism, benevolent and hostile, self- or other-directed, including stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination of older patients. The COVID-19 pandemic-related ageist measures increased healthcare ageism and transformed nurses’ representations of older patients accordingly. Nurses felt moral conflict both when passively witnessing ageist acts and when perpetrating them (...) to adhere to group norms, highlighting the need to combat ageism for both patients’ and nurses’ well-being. (shrink)

With this nuanced and interdisciplinary work, political theorist Mihaela Mihai tackles several interrelated questions: How do societies remember histories of systemic violence? Who is excluded from such histories' cast of characters? And what are the political costs of selective remembering in the present? Building on insights from political theory, social epistemology, and feminist and critical race theory, Mihai argues that a double erasure often structures hegemonic narratives of complex violence: of widespread, heterogeneous complicity and of "impure" resistances, not easily (...) subsumed to exceptionalist heroic models. In dialogue with care ethicists and philosophers of art, she then suggests that such narrative reductionism can be disrupted aesthetically through practices of "mnemonic care," that is, through the hermeneutical labor that critical artists deliver—thematically and formally—within communities' space of meaning. Empirically, the book examines both consecrated and marginalized artists who tackled the memory of Vichy France, communist Romania, and apartheid South Africa. Despite their specificities, these contexts present us with an opportunity to analyze similar mnemonic dynamics and to recognize the political impact of dissenting artistic production. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, the book intervenes in debates over collective responsibility, historical injustice, and the aesthetics of violence within political theory, memory studies, social epistemology, and transitional justice. (shrink)

Kant’s early work The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures is typically considered a narrow, technical work still embedded in the tradition of Wolffian logic. I argue instead that it needs to be considered in light of Kant’s developing theory of cognition and his corresponding criticism of the Wolffian single faculty theory. Whereas the mature Kant criticizes the rationalists for misrepresenting the nature of sensibility, the urgent task facing him at this stage seems to have been a proper determination (...) of the nature of the understanding. On the Wolffian framework, the latter is defined in a merely nominal manner, in terms of a generic cognitive task: the distinct representation of the possible. On Kant’s view, however, distinctness entails a capacity to relate representations, which only happens in the act of judgment. Thus, the stated aim of the False Subtlety notwithstanding, the work attempts to reorganize the logical operations around the capacity to judge. In turn, by defining the higher faculty of cognition in terms of an act of relating representations, Kant wants to show that this faculty cannot stem from a power of representation that we share with non-rational animals and must instead rest on a different fundamental power, which at the time he alternatively calls “inner sense” or “consciousness”. (shrink)

This book investigates the link Kant discerned between our experience of beauty and our experience of the moral law. By examining Kant's relation to Greek philosophy, to Plato and Pythagoras, as found in Kant's own writings, the author sheds new light on one the most intriguing and mysterious doctrines of Kant's third Critique.

This paper is an analysis of comparative multiculturalisms. Starting from the historical reality that both the Roma and the African-Americans were reified through slavery and discriminated against because of their racial visibility, the author analyses the position of the two groups in the Romanian, namely, the American society. The lead of the African-Americans in overcoming the racial stigma is explained by the author through: the opportunities offered by a powerful and consolidated democracy, and by the existence of an elite of (...) the minority group. These factors should be envisaged by Romanian society when trying to make both the minority and the majority cooperate in order to avoid the transformation of the Roma into an under-class group, a great challenge with a view to Romania’s integration into the EU structures. (shrink)

Moshe Idel, Ascension on High in Jewish Mysticism: Pillars, Lines, Ladders Budapest:Central European University Press, 2005.

This conference follows the “traditional” poetics of many Romanian feminist discourses: warning, justification, and body proper. After introducing new proofs about the necessity of feminist discourse in present-day Romania, the conference deploys the body of the conference proper. The conference has two main sections, constructed symmetrically according to the distance/proximity principle, which argue for the specific position of Romanian feminism among contemporary feminisms.

Recent research has shown that the corporate social responsibility system has a positive impact on consumer behavior regarding products or services that promote social responsibility. Thus, it can be stated that customer loyalty to a particular company derives not only from commercial benefits but also from the components of corporate social responsibilities practiced by the company. The vast majority of company managers in Romania do not understand what it means to be a socially responsible company, which is why they do (...) not even agree with most of the definitions given to corporate social responsibility; secondly, when asked to explain what social responsibility means, they are not able to make logical arguments; I argue that the involvement of companies in social responsibility activities has a purely economic motivation and that it is related to the size of the company, rather large companies integrating the implementation of CSR activities in its vision. From a marketing perspective, corporate social responsibility has proven its ability to generate many benefits for companies, implementing and communicating specific policies and actions in this regard with the potential to improve satisfaction and loyalty, both among customers and of employees. The main objective of the article is to analyze the way in which consumers in Romania perceive the corporate social responsibility system of companies. (shrink)

The definition and measurement of the impact of laws and courts is a subject of disagreement and uncertainties. In this article, law is understood as a public, general, and binding command enforceable through state coercion. Assessments on the effects of laws on democracy and development focus on changes in specific social indicators. The evaluation of impact relates to the availability and reliability of judicial statistics and the impact of laws depends on political and social conditions. The interaction of laws can (...) be studied in three contextual variables: the structure and competitiveness of political systems, the structure and performance of the judiciary, and the organizational endowments of the social or political actors, such as social and labor movements that use the law. This interaction shows how and why certain conditions affect impact. It also speculates, about some additional developments that might follow from the relationships between law and these three variables. (shrink)

The selfish goal metaphor is interesting and intriguing. It accounts for the idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies in peoples' goal pursuits without invoking free will, self-regulatory, or self-control failures. However, people pursue multiple goals, sometimes simultaneously. We argue that the model proposed in the target article may gain significant theoretical and practical value if the principles underlying goal selection and/or balancing on a moment-to-moment basis are clearly specified and integrated with the notion of the selfish goal.

This article advances research on moral responsibility in organizations by drawing on both philosophical virtue ethics grounded in the Aristotelian tradition and Positive Organizational Scholarship research concerned with virtuousness. The article discusses the very conditions that make possible the realization of virtues and virtuousness, respectively. These conditions ground notions of moral responsibility and the resulting praise or blame on organizational contexts. Thus, we analyze the way individuals and organizations may be ascribed interconnected degrees of retrospective moral responsibility and blame as (...) depending on the interplay between the individual conditions leading to virtue and the organizational conditions leading to virtuousness. Based on this analysis, we develop a two‐level account of moral responsibility in organizations that connects individual and organizational moral responsibility through the concepts of virtue and virtuousness. This is further operationalized into practical guidelines to ascribe degrees of individual and organizational blame, which can be used as a tool by managers, policymakers, or industry regulators. (shrink)

Vehement resentment and indignation are rife in societies emerging from dictatorship or civil conflict. How should institutions deal with these emotions? Arguing for the need to recognize and constructively engage negative public emotions, Mihaela Mihai contributes theoretically to the growing field of transitional justice. Drawing on an extensive philosophical literature and case studies of democratic transitions in South Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe, her book rescues negative emotions from their bad reputation and highlights the obstacles and the opportunities (...) such emotions create for democracy. By valorizing negative emotions, either through the judicial review of transitional justice bills or the criminal trials of victimizers, institutions realize the value of respect and concern for all while contributing to a public culture hospitable to democracy. (shrink)