Normative philosophy believes that argumentation concerning values is rational because there is a deeper value to which all are committed. Citing Ronald Dworkin’s 1977’s Taking Rights Seriously, Will Kymlicka suggests that this “ultimate value” is equality. Having a standard enables rationality because it enables competing theories to show “that one of the theories does a better job living up to the standard that they all recognize”. The measure for whether an argument weighs as much as it claims is how well (...) it accounts for treating people equally and fairly. Fair and equal treatment is measurable enough, and for the same reason values generally are: it helps form the reality of... (shrink)

Rhetoric, like any other practice, is always to be used to serve the ends of justice, and for that alone.People will be responsible for the needs of others only when they are responsive to the feelings of need, anxiety, and desire in real other people who work in real material conditions. This direct response will take place only when people are fully responsive to, and fully responsible for, their own feelings. This responsibility for individual feeling, for full complexity and depth (...) of individual feeling, is thus of political not simply personal importance.To theorize justice rhetorically, this article reviews two major theories of rhetoric that address justice: the New Rhetoric of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie .. (shrink)

"Few thinkers have stood as squarely at both the center and the periphery of an intellectual movement as has Shao Yung (1011-1077). Ethical model and eccentric, socialite and eremite, Shao Yung is perhaps not only the greatest enigma of early Neo-Confucianism, but also one of its undisputed giants. In this impressive life-and-thought study, Don J. Wyatt painstakingly sifts through all available evidence relating to Shao Yung and his scholarship to provide a portrait that fully exposes the moral center of the (...) man and his work. Drawing on the abundant store of letters and accounts by Shao's contemporaries and his own much-neglected poetry, Wyatt has assembled a study that intimately relates Shao's life to his thought. He challenges the assumptions of previous Western scholarship by persuasively arguing against the acceptance of works traditionally ascribed to Shao - specifically, the Kuan-wu wai-p'ien (Outer Chapters on Observing Things), the Yu-ch'iao wen-ta (Fisherman and Woodcutter Dialogue), and the cryptic quasi-autobiographical essay Wu-ming kung chuan (Biography of the Nameless Lord)." "Shao is presented as an independent thinker whose philosophical lexicon functioned according to a profound interdependence that was unique among the systems of his peers. His metaphysical concepts, which appear impervious to and beyond the scope of human influence - namely, his ching-shih (world ordering), kuan-wu (observing things), and I-Ching - derived hsien-t'ien (before Heaven) methodologies - are essentially the products of a morally reflective life. Wyatt's discoveries, therefore, refute the common assertion of Shao Yung's moral indifference. Moreover, by meticulously integrating the progress of this Neo-Confucian's thought into the course of his life, the author has produced one of the most textured and accessible works on a philosopher of the Sung era."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

In light of an historical obsession with human error, Krueger & Funder (K&F) suggest that social psychologists should emphasize the strengths of social perception. In our view, however, absolute levels of accuracy (or error) in any given experiment are less important than underlying processes. We discuss the use of the process-dissociation procedure for gaining insight into the mechanisms underlying accuracy and error.

Discernible in the very opening pages of Chinese Philosophy of History: From Ancient Confucianism to the End of the Eighteenth Century is the fact that, within a single work, Dawid Rogacz will be providing us with two services normally regarded as oppositional. On the one hand, clear from the very title is the discreteness of his undertaking. In other words, he will be straightforwardly addressing a subject that philosophers as well as historians of China frequently refer to but, nonetheless, so (...) very seldom subject to critical examination--namely, the uniquely Chinese, as distinguished from that which subsequently developed in the West, philosophy of history. Yet, on the other hand, even as he is intent on... (shrink)

Often depicted as pitted in cosmic struggle against nobler multitudes of spiritual or heavenly warriors, when viewed from our modernist perspective, the ghostly or demon warriors of Chinese tradition are stigmatized as being, at best, ambiguous in status and, at worst, as perverse beings of consummately evil ill repute. However, discoveries from investigation into the historical origins of these demonic soldiers or troopers demand that we regard them as much more enigmatic in their roles and functions than is initially suggested. (...) Documented earliest references indicate not only how the concept of demon warrior first arose for the purposes of furthering and facilitating the immortality ethos of religious Daoism. Also evident from these first written mentions is the clear and unassailable fact that the prototypes for these ghostly beings were unmistakably and very often unremarkably human. Subsequent literature, especially that surviving in the genre of early medieval tales of the strange, only reinforces the notion of these sometimes real and other times fantastical purveyors of violence as occupants of the permeable vortex thinly separating the human and the supernatural worlds, allowing them to manifest themselves at will and freely in either venue. Furthermore, we learn foremost how their primal function was not unlike that of Western guardian angels in being principally tutelary, with the tacit expectation that they should serve dutifully in defense of those who either cultivated or conjured them forth, ensuring the wellbeing of the living by acting as a kind of collective bulwark against the forces of death. (shrink)

In the civilizations of the classical West, as exemplified foremost by that of Greece, as well as in that of early imperial China, the idea that humans who excelled exceptionally in war could merit deification was an abiding operative assumption. Given this premise, unsurprising then is the fact that such individuals should be found to have exhibited certain defining traits in common, including exceptional bravery and skill in leadership as well as—at least up until the point of their own deaths—an (...) outstanding record of battlefield success. In addition, whether in Greece or in China, we find that the elevation of the exemplary warrior to the status of a god occurred under religious auspices, or was abetted by a belief structure that at least exhibited many of the core customary functions of a conventional religion. However, if we must regard the normative Chinese paradigm of martial divinization as having consistently departed in conception from its counterpart in the West, then surely the determinative difference is the premium placed on the Chinese demonstration of loyalty. In China, inasmuch as there were credentials for deification, the individual warrior’s unfailing subscription to the virtue of loyalty seems to have superseded all else, and the pathway to immortality as a god was forever obstructed without it. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This manuscript develops the concept of organizational virtue orientation (OVO) and examines differences between family and non-family firms on the six organizational virtue dimensions of Integrity, Empathy, Warmth, Courage, Conscientiousness, and Zeal. Using content analysis of shareholder letters fromS&P 500companies, our analyses find that there are significant differences between family and non-family firms in their espoused OVO, with family firms generally being higher. Specifically, family firms were significantly higher on the dimensions of Empathy, Warmth, and Zeal, but lower on Courage. (...) Based on these findings we further develop the OVO concept through the discussion of implications and areas for future research. (shrink)

The I Ching, or Book of Changes, has been one of the two or three most influential books in the Chinese canon. It has been used by people on all levels of society, both as a method of divination and as a source of essential ideas about the nature of heaven, earth, and humankind. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Sung dynasty literati turned to it for guidance in their fundamental reworking of the classical traditions. This book explores how four (...) leading thinkers — Su Shih, Shao Yung, Ch’eng I, and Chu Hsi — applied the I Ching to these projects. These four men used the Book of Changes in strikingly different ways. Yet each claimed to find in it a sure foundation for human values. Their work established not only new meanings for the text but also new models for governance and moral philosophy that would be debated throughout the next thousand years of Chinese intellectual history. By focusing on their uses of the I Ching, this study casts a unique light on the complex continuity-within-change and rich diversity of Sung culture. (shrink)

First published in 1818, The World as Will and Representation contains Schopenhauer's entire philosophy, ranging through epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and action, aesthetics and philosophy of art, to ethics, the meaning of life and the philosophy of religion, in an attempt to account for the world in all its significant aspects. It gives a unique and influential account of what is and is not of value in existence, the striving and pain of the human condition and the possibility of (...) deliverance from it. This new translation of the first volume of what later became a two-volume work reflects the eloquence and power of Schopenhauer's prose and renders philosophical terms accurately and consistently. It offers an introduction, glossary of names and bibliography, and succinct editorial notes, including notes on the revisions of the text which Schopenhauer made in 1844 and 1859. (shrink)

Deception has long been an important topic in philosophy. However, the traditional analysis of the concept, which requires that a deceiver intentionally cause her victim to have a false belief, rules out the possibility of much deception in the animal kingdom. Cognitively unsophisticated species, such as fireflies and butterflies, have simply evolved to mislead potential predators and/or prey. To capture such cases of “functional deception,” several researchers Machiavellian intelligence II, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 112–143, 1997; Searcy and Nowicki, The (...) evolution of animal communication, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005; Skyrms, Signals, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2010) have endorsed the broader view that deception only requires that a deceiver benefit from sending a misleading signal. Moreover, in order to facilitate game-theoretic study of deception in the context of Lewisian sender-receiver games, Brian Skyrms has proposed an influential formal analysis of this view. Such formal analyses have the potential to enhance our philosophical understanding of deception in humans as well as animals. However, as we argue in this paper, Skyrms’s analysis, as well as two recently proposed alternative analyses, are seriously flawed and can lead us to draw unwarranted conclusions about deception. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This manuscript develops the concept of organizational virtue orientation (OVO) and examines differences between family and non-family firms on the six organizational virtue dimensions of Integrity, Empathy, Warmth, Courage, Conscientiousness, and Zeal. Using content analysis of shareholder letters fromS&P 500companies, our analyses find that there are significant differences between family and non-family firms in their espoused OVO, with family firms generally being higher. Specifically, family firms were significantly higher on the dimensions of Empathy, Warmth, and Zeal, but lower on Courage. (...) Based on these findings we further develop the OVO concept through the discussion of implications and areas for future research. (shrink)

Written in 1839 and chosen as the winning entry in a competition held by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences, Schopenhauer's Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will marked the beginning of its author's public recognition and is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant and elegant treatments of free will and determinism. Schopenhauer distinguishes the freedom of acting from the freedom of willing, affirming the former while denying the latter. He portrays human action as thoroughly determined but (...) also argues that the freedom which cannot be established in the sphere of human action is preserved at the level of our innermost being as individuated will, whose reality transcends all dependency on outside factors. This volume offers the text in a previously unpublished translation by Eric F. J. Payne, the leading twentieth-century translator of Schopenhauer into English, together with a historical and philosophical introduction by Günter Zöller. (shrink)

Measures of epistemic utility are used by formal epistemologists to make determinations of epistemic betterness among cognitive states. The Brier rule is the most popular choice among formal epistemologists for such a measure. In this paper, however, we show that the Brier rule is sometimes seriously wrong about whether one cognitive state is epistemically better than another. In particular, there are cases where an agent gets evidence that definitively eliminates a false hypothesis, but where the Brier rule says that things (...) have become epistemically worse. Along the way to this ‘elimination experiment’ counter-example to the Brier rule as a measure of epistemic utility, we identify several useful monotonicity principles for epistemic betterness. We also reply to several potential objections to this counter-example. (shrink)

In cases of animal mimicry, the receiver of the signal learns the truth that he is either dealing with the real thing or with a mimic. Thus, despite being a prototypical example of animal deception, mimicry does not seem to qualify as deception on the traditional definition, since the receiver is not actually misled. We offer a new account of propositional content in sender-receiver games that explains how the receiver is misled by mimicry. We show that previous accounts of deception, (...) and of propositional content, give incorrect results about whether certain signals are deceptive. (shrink)

Accuracy-based arguments for conditionalization and probabilism appear to have a significant advantage over their Dutch Book rivals. They rely only on the plausible epistemic norm that one should try to decrease the inaccuracy of one’s beliefs. Furthermore, conditionalization and probabilism apparently follow from a wide range of measures of inaccuracy. However, we argue that there is an under-appreciated diachronic constraint on measures of inaccuracy which limits the measures from which one can prove conditionalization, and none of the remaining measures allow (...) one to prove probabilism. That is, among the measures in the literature, there are some from which one can prove conditionalization, others from which one can prove probabilism, but none from which one can prove both. Hence at present, the accuracy-based approach cannot underwrite both conditionalization and probabilism. (shrink)

The study of business ethics has led to the development of various principles that are the foundation of good and ethical business practices. A corresponding study of Information Technology (IT) professionals’ ethics has led to the conclusion that good ethics in the development and uses of information technology correspond to the basic business principle that good ethics is good business. Ergo, good business ethics practiced by IT professionals is good IT ethics and vice versa. IT professionals are professionals in businesses; (...) a difficulty presented to these professionals, however, is the number and diversity of codes of ethics to which they may be held. Considering the existence of several formalized codes of ethics prepared by various IT professionals’ associations, a more harmonized approach seems more reasonable. This paper attempts to present a review of the purpose of codes of ethics, the persons who should be covered by such codes and to organize codes of ethics for business in general and IT professionals in particular and to make the argument that, once again, good ethics is good business practice, regardless of the profession or occupation concerned. (shrink)

It is possible that you are living in a simulation—that your world is computer-generated rather than physical. But how likely is this scenario? Bostrom and Chalmers each argue that it is moderately likely—neither very likely nor very unlikely. However, they adopt an unorthodox form of reasoning about self-location uncertainty. Our main contention here is that Bostrom’s and Chalmers’ premises, when combined with orthodoxy about self-location, yields instead the conclusion that you are almost certainly living in a simulation. We consider how (...) this (surprising) conclusion might be resisted, and show that the analogy between Sleeping Beauty cases and simulation cases provides a new way of evaluating approaches to self-location uncertainty. In particular, we argue that some conditionalization-based approaches to self-location are problematically limited in their applicability. (shrink)