This study examines social desirability bias in the context of ethical decision-making by accountants. It hypothesizes a negative relation between social desirability bias and ethical evaluation. It also predicts an interaction effect between religiousness and gender on social desirability bias. An experiment using five general business vignettes was carried out on 121 accountants (63 males and 58 females). The results show that social desirability bias is higher (lower) when the situation encountered is more (less) unethical. The bias has religiousness and (...) gender main effects as well as an interaction effect between these two independent variables. Women who were more religious recorded the highest bias scores relative to less religious women and men regardless of their religiousness. (shrink)

An educated healthcare professional or student is sensitive and able to make good judgements, understanding existential challenging issues. It is argued that the ideas within phenomenology and hermeneutics can function as a basis for comprehension. This article focuses on how choice of perspective and knowledge is of importance to what we do in practice. However, education does not consist of mere accumulation of knowledge and ways of explanation. We do not become competent practitioners by being able to reproduce philosophical ideas. (...) These are merely perspectives by means of which we can seek to go beyond what we take for granted, or what we assume to know, thus enabling us to take a new direction understanding problems and issues that until now may have been hidden to us. In other words, understanding is of an existential character, whereas an observing healthcare professional must be aware and open to the mental aspects of life. It is therefore important to attune ourselves to being sensitive to and aware of experiences from our lifeworld, understanding what they imply. It is argued that literature provides insight into human nature through the written depiction of real or imagined experiences. To develop such narrative imagination, it is suggested that literature should be part of the curriculum of various educations. This is relevant to healthcare professionals who thereby can get an important insight into human nature and begin to develop the self‐awareness and sensitivity to others that is so central to care. (shrink)

In _The Eudaimonist Ethics of al-Fārābī and Avicenna_, Janne Mattila provides the first comprehensive account of the ethical thought of al-Fārābī and Avicenna.

Friendly persuasion, in contrast to deterrent measures like tax audits and penalties on underreported taxes, is a positive and possibly a cost effective method of increasing taxpayer compliance. However, prior studies have failed to show that friendly persuasion has a significant impact on compliance (Blumenthal et al., 2001; McGraw and Scholz, 1991). In our study, in contrast to prior studies, we examine the impact of generating and reading reasons supporting compliance as friendly persuasion on individuals' income reporting behavior as well (...) as control for gender effects. Specifically, we predict an interaction effect between friendly persuasion and gender on compliance behavior. We carried out a 2 (friendly persuasion and control) × 2 (men and women) full factorial experiment, where participants earned $30 by completing two questionnaires. Participants in the friendly persuasion group were required first to generate and second to read a list of reasons why they should comply fully. Afterwards, participants in both groups were asked to report the income they earned and pay tax on the reported income. The results show a significant main effect for gender as well as a significant interaction effect between gender and friendly persuasion on income reported. Women in the friendly persuasion group reported significantly higher income compared to men in that group. Other comparisons were not significant. Policy implications for increasing taxpayers' ethics and compliance are highlighted. (shrink)

This study examines whether truth-telling in the form of honest reporting is associated with cognitive moral development. Conventional agency theory assumes that people are self-interested and willing to tell a lie to increase their personal payoffs, while recent empirical evidence shows that some people give up monetary rewards to tell the truth. The social psychology literature suggests that cognitive moral development influences individuals’ ethical decisions. We carried out an experiment whereby participants submitted managerial reports in which truth-telling decreased their monetary (...) payoff. Despite the fact that their decisions were not subject to monitoring, auditing, or reputation effects, some participants reported honestly or partially honestly. We find the relationship between honest reporting and cognitive moral development to be both positive and linear. Compared with those at lower stages of cognitive moral development, participants at higher stages of cognitive moral development were more likely to submit an honest report and give up potential monetary gains from lying. We further examine the economic impact of honest reporting on the firm’s profit. With the assumption of self-interest and profit maximization, Antle and Eppen suggest that a contract with a hurdle-rate feature reduces managers’ information rent. We find that in comparison with the expected outcome of a hurdle contract, the firm can yield higher profits with a trust contract by hiring managers with a P-score higher than 16.67. (shrink)

Although there is a growing acknowledgement of the potential of a more nuanced healthcare paradigm and practice, the discourses of health promotion—and with that nursing and other healthcare professionals’ practice—still tend to focus on the medical diagnosis, disease and the rationale of biomedicine. There is a need for shifting to a human practice that draws on a broader perspective related to illness. This requires a transformation of practices which can be constructed within a narrative understanding. A narrative approach appreciates the (...) importance of emotion and intersubjective relation in the telling and listening that occur in the clinical encounter. The essence of nursing lies in the creative imagination, the sensitive spirit and the intelligent understanding of the individuals’ possibilities of becoming empowered in his or her own life. This entails that the focus of the use of patients’ narratives is, ultimately, not the story itself, but the nurses’ and other healthcare professionals’ ability to support the patients in finding useful meaning in their stories. Herein, it is of particular importance to let the patients narrate about what is sparkling moments or events in the lived life. Stories with such focus can open up for patients’ hopes and dreams, which gives inspiration for finding meaningful ways to cope in life empowering personal recovery. It is, therefore, crucial to transform clinical settings into places that acknowledge the need for imagination and creativity, aiming at creating the opportunity for sensibility and vision essential to encouraging a narrative approach and thereby the ability to reflect upon and promote a healing process. (shrink)

The purpose of this exploratory study is to examine the use of an ethical intervention strategy – counterexplanation – on individuals’ ethical decision-making. As opposed to providing reasons to support a decision in the case of explanation, counterexplanation is the provision of reasons that either speak against or provide evidence against a chosen course of action. The number of explanations and/or counterexplanations provided by the participants is expected to have a significant effect on ethical evaluation and intention. The number of (...) explanations is expected to be negatively related to ethical decision-making while the number of counterexplanations is expected to be positively related to ethical decision-making. The experiment, that made use of five ethical vignettes, manipulated four treatment groups – explanation, counterexplanation, explanation/counterexplanation, and counterexplanation/explanation. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the four reatments. They performed the requirements of their treatment before recording their ethical evaluations and intentions. As expected, larger numbers of explanations led to less ethical decision-making and larger numbers of counterexplanations led to more ethical decision-making. However, when both types of explanations are required, the order of counterexplaining before explaining is more desirable as it leads to more ethical decision-making. The study also reports that individuals with high social desirability bias (a tendency to present oneself in a culturally acceptable manner) may generate less counterexplanations. Implications of the findings are explained in the paper. (shrink)

It has been debated whether the so-called attention economy, in which the attention of agents is measured and sold, jeopardizes something of value. One strand of this discussion has focused on so-called attention rights, asking: should attention be legally protected, either by introducing novel rights or by extending the scope of pre-existing rights? In this paper, however, in order to further this discussion, we ask: How is attention already protected legally? In what situations does a person have the right to (...) attention under current law? -/- Unlike (Chomanski, Neuroethics 16:1–11, 2023), who discusses an overall right to attention, or (Puri, Rutgers Law Record 48:206–221, 2021), who discusses an overall right to attentional privacy, in this paper we focus on two types of situations in which a person’s attention is already protected by legal regulation. Sustained attention-requiring tasks can be jeopardized by distractions whereas attentiveness to certain kind of stimuli can be jeopardized by immersive stimuli. That is why distractions are regulated in situations where an agent has what we call a concentration right and immersive stimuli are regulated in situations where an agent has what we call a duty to be attentive. The further analysis of these situations provides an understanding of the legal means by which attention is already regulated, which can be helpful when thinking about how it should be regulated in the future. (shrink)

The purpose of this exploratory study is to examine the use of an ethical intervention strategy - counterexplanation - on individuals' ethical decision-Making. As opposed to providing reasons to support a decision in the case of explanation, counterexplanation is the provision of reasons that either speak against or provide evidence against a chosen course of action. The number of explanations and/or counterexplanations provided by the participants is expected to have a significant effect on ethical evaluation and intention. The number of (...) explanations is expected to be negatively related to ethical decision-making while the number of counterexplanations is expected to be positively related to ethical decision-making. The experiment, that made use of five ethical vignettes, manipulated four treatment groups - explanation, counterexplanation, explanation/counterexplanation, and counterexplanation/explanation. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the four reatments. They performed the requirements of their treatment before recording their ethical evaluations and intentions. As expected, larger numbers of explanations led to less ethical decision-making and larger numbers of counterexplanations led to more ethical decision-making. However, when both types of explanations are required, the order of counterexplaining before explaining is more desirable as it leads to more ethical decision-making. The study also reports that individuals with high social desirability bias may generate less counterexplanations. Implications of the findings are explained in the paper. (shrink)

This work offers a new theory of what it means to be a legal person and suggests that it is best understood as a cluster property. The book explores the origins of legal personhood, the issues afflicting a traditional understanding of the concept, and the numerous debates surrounding the topic.

This is an essay based on a story with observations, about present and sparkling moments from everyday life coexisting with a mother living with dementia. The story is used to begin philosophical underpinnings reflecting on ‘how it could be otherwise’. Dementia deploys brutal existential experiences such as cognitive deterioration, decline in mental functioning and often hurtful social judgements. The person living with dementia goes through transformation and changes of self. Cognitive decline progressively disrupts the foundations upon which social connectedness is (...) built, often creating a profound sense of insecurity. The challenge for carers and healthcare professionals is therefore to find ways of clarifying a concept of agency. It will be worthwhile developing the ability of attuning into ‘what is there’ arising from every corner of the care situation. Understanding and practicing this can strengthen existence and the experience of connectedness and meaning, empowering the person with dementia. It is important to find ways, relational moves, in which carers and healthcare professionals can embed the creativity appearing in mundane everyday situations filled with surplus of meaning, sharing mental landscapes (and embodied relational understanding) with the person living with dementia – seizing and sharing aesthetic moments (verbal and nonverbal) being present together. We argue that carers and healthcare professionals may find this understanding of care useful. This implies looking into a phenomenological‐hermeneutic perspective developing competences as well as practical wisdom understanding and being aware of the creative and innovative possibilities (often preverbal and unnoticed small things) in everyday life of what we, inspired by psychoanalyst Daniel Stern, call sparkling moments of meeting, creating experience with the other that is personally undergone and lived through in the present. (shrink)

This article introduces a new formulation of the interest theory of rights. The focus is on ‘Bentham’s test’, which was devised by Matthew Kramer to limit the expansiveness of the interest theory. According to the test, a party holds a right correlative to a duty only if that party stands to undergo a development that is typically detrimental if the duty is breached. The article shows how the entire interest theory can be reformulated in terms of the test. The article (...) then focuses on a further strength of the interest theory, brought to the fore by the new formulation. In any Western legal system, the tortious maltreatment of a child or a mentally disabled individual results in a compensatory duty. The interest theory can account for such duties in a simple and elegant way. The will theory, on the other hand, struggles to explain such compensatory duties unless it abandons some of its main tenets. (shrink)

Adopting the methods of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, this article aims to add to our knowledge of the dynamics and resistance in professional-client encounters. It does this by examining the argumentative function of second-hand assessments in the setting of vocational rehabilitation. In the situated negotiation of appropriate work-targeted initiatives, the practice of reporting second-hand assessments functions either as ‘opposing’ the professional’s investigations, or, when used in initiating turns, as ‘promoting’ the client’s case. Regarding the first, second-hand assessments provide opportunities to (...) oppose and redirect the institutional agenda. That is, the issue introduced by the professional is fended off more or less openly through second-hand accounts, which provide a presumptive better grasp on the matter at hand. (shrink)

This edited work collates novel contributions on contemporary topics that are related to human rights. The essays address analytic-descriptive questions, such as what legal personality actually means, and normative questions, such as who or what should be recognised as a legal person. As is well-known among jurists, the law has a special conception of personhood: corporations are persons, whereas slaves have traditionally been considered property rather than persons. This odd state of affairs has not garnered the interest of legal theorists (...) for a while and the theory of legal personhood has been a relatively peripheral topic in jurisprudence for at least 50 years. As readers will see, there have recently been many developments and debates that justify a theoretical investigation of this topic. Animal rights activists have been demanding that some animals be recognized as legal persons. The field of robotics has prompted questions about driverless cars: should they be granted a limited legal personality, so that the car itself would be responsible for damages? This book explores such concepts and touches on matters of bioethics, animal law and medical law. It includes matters of legal history and appeals to both legal scholars and philosophers, especially those with an interest in theories of law and the philosophy of law. (shrink)

This introduction gives a rough sketch of the context of Mare liberum's publication and the main arguments Grotius made in this pamphlet. It touches briefly on some of the latest arguments on Mare liberum and provides a survey of the contributions to this Commemmorative Issue. Moreover, it sets the stage for the contributions which elaborate on the fate of Grotian concepts - not so much by historically tracing these ideas over the past 400 years, but by offering an analysis of (...) how similar concepts are used in international law today. (shrink)

This book aims to contribute to our understanding of one of the most pressing issues of modern international law: the relationship between the international legal order on the one hand and the domestic legal orders of over 190 sovereign states on the other handThe traditional and dominant understanding of this relationship is that there exists a strict separation between the international legal order and domestic legal orders. Processes of legal globalisation and internationalisation have made this relationship much more complex. Legal (...) authority has shifted away from the state in both vertical and horizontal directions. Forced by the pressures of interdependence, states have allowed international bodies to oversee and sometimes even implement and enforce domestic legislation. At the same time, private persons are more and more drawn into an internationalized order. Increasing cross-border flows of services, goods and capital, mobility, and communication have further undermined any stable notion of what is national and what is international.This book offers several partly complementary and partly competing perspectives that allow us understand and make sense of the complex interaction between the international and domestic sphere. (shrink)

Paslers stated aim-to flesh out the contingencies and rich complexity of theparticular moments in which music was conceived, created, performed, and heard, is ...

We present a proof for a conjecture previously formulated by Dzhafarov et al.. The conjecture specifies a measure for the degree of contextuality and a criterion for contextuality in a broad class of quantum systems. This class includes Leggett–Garg, EPR/Bell, and Klyachko–Can–Binicioglu–Shumovsky type systems as special cases. In a system of this class certain physical properties \ are measured in pairs \ \); every property enters in precisely two such pairs; and each measurement outcome is a binary random variable. Denoting (...) the measurement outcomes for a property \ in the two pairs it enters by \ and \, the pair of measurement outcomes for \ \) is \ \). Contextuality is defined as follows: one computes the minimal possible value \ for the sum of \ ) that is allowed by the individual distributions of \ and \; one computes the minimal possible value \ for the sum of \ across all possible couplings of the entire set of random variables \ in the system; and the system is considered contextual if \ ). This definition has its justification in the general approach dubbed Contextuality-by-Default, and it allows for measurement errors and signaling among the measured properties. The conjecture proved in this paper specifies the value of \ in terms of the distributions of the measurement outcomes \ \). (shrink)

World political processes, such as wars and globalisation, are engendered by complex sets of causes and conditions. Although the idea of causation is fundamental to the field of International Relations, what the concept of cause means or entails has remained an unresolved and contested matter. In recent decades ferocious debates have surrounded the idea of causal analysis, some scholars even questioning the legitimacy of applying the notion of cause in the study of International Relations. This book suggests that underlying the (...) debates on causation in the field of International Relations is a set of problematic assumptions and that we should reclaim causal analysis from the dominant discourse of causation. Milja Kurki argues that reinterpreting the meaning, aims and methods of social scientific causal analysis opens up multi-causal and methodologically pluralist avenues for future International Relations scholarship. (shrink)

In welfare encounters, clients may from time to time report about other peoples’ doings in ways that are heard as more or less downgrading. This article examines how these reports are brought off in Norwegian vocational rehabilitation encounters, and especially, how the professional party aligns. Do such practices represent what Levinson calls ‘allowable contributions’ in the vocational rehabilitation meeting or are they treated as matter out of place? The analysis of five data extracts suggests that it is very important for (...) the reception that the report is well contextualized and attuned to the institutional agenda. The counsellors displayed a neutral but cooperative alignment to reports integrated neatly in the business-at-hand in a top-down fashion. Here, the reports served as a tool to inform the recipient about the client’s own character and/or her experience of the rehabilitation process. However, in the two latter cases, where the client had a more initiating role, the reports appeared to have a more humorous or entertaining function. In response, the counsellors did not display alignment but searched for institutional relevance before re-contextualizing the report into a proper context. This suggests that out-of-frame reports about other people delivered on a humorous footing do not straightforwardly fall into the category of ‘allowable contributions’ in this setting. (shrink)

Families have a right to privacy, but we know little about how the public–private boundary is negotiated at the micro level in educational settings. Adopting ethnomethodology, the paper examines how talk about the home situation was occasioned and managed in ten parent–teacher conferences in early childhood education and care (ECEC), with a special focus on the ECEC teacher’s strategies for eliciting family information. The paper demonstrates a continuum of interactional practices which, in various degrees, make parents accountable for providing family (...) information. The analysis shows that parents both volunteer and provide the pursued information, thus actively orienting to the norm of visibility in child rearing. However, although both parties orient to questioning and fishing as business as usual, the parents’ accounts sometimes had an excusing quality or they adopted a reserved communication style, suggesting a certain ambivalence as well. The paper outlines different ways of understanding the present partnership ideal in parent–teacher teacher cooperation with implications for the negotiation of privacy. The paper also addresses training, which can contribute to staff and student reflections on the management of the public–private boundary. (shrink)

In this article, I focus on possibly impaired self-determination in addiction. After some methodological reflections, I introduce a phenomenological description of the experience of being self-determined. I argue that being self-determined implies effectivity of agency regarding three different behavioural domains. Such self-referential agency shall be called ‘self-effectivity’ in this article. In a second step, I will use this phenomenological description to understand the impairments of self-determination in addiction. While addiction does not necessarily imply a basic lack of control over one’s (...) life, this can well be the case during certain periods of time or in special situations. Addiction is herein described as an embodied custom—highly effective with respect to changing one’s lived experience—which is learned and developed while becoming addicted. Such a repeatedly performed custom, called a ‘psychotropic technique’, implies deep changes in one’s personal identity and alters an agent’s ‘self-effectivity’. In the closing section, I discuss the possible implications of a phenomenological approach to personal responsibility. (shrink)

Many condensed matter systems are such that their collective excitations at low energies can be described by fields satisfying equations of motion formally indistinguishable from those of relativistic field theory. The finite speed of propagation of the disturbances in the effective fields (in the simplest models, the speed of sound) plays here the role of the speed of light in fundamental physics. However, these apparently relativistic fields are immersed in an external Newtonian world (the condensed matter system itself and the (...) laboratory can be considered Newtonian, since all the velocities involved are much smaller than the velocity of light) which provides a privileged coordinate system and therefore seems to destroy the possibility of having a perfectly defined relativistic emergent world. In this essay we ask ourselves the following question: In a homogeneous condensed matter medium, is there a way for internal observers, dealing exclusively with the low-energy collective phenomena, to detect their state of uniform motion with respect to the medium? By proposing a thought experiment based on the construction of a Michelson-Morley interferometer made of quasi-particles, we show that a real Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction takes place, so that internal observers are unable to find out anything about their ‘absolute’ state of motion. Therefore, we also show that an effective but perfectly defined relativistic world can emerge in a fishbowl world situated inside a Newtonian (laboratory) system. This leads us to reflect on the various levels of description in physics, in particular regarding the quest towards a theory of quantum gravity. (shrink)

We examine recent evolution in corporate responsibility in the forest industry, an important natural-resource-based industry which is under rapid internationalisation and structural change under challenging financial pressures. We address two recent trends in corporate communication: corporate disclosure, that is the adoption of consistent external reporting standards [namely the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) ], and the growing awareness of engagement with and impact on local communities through philanthropy, generation of prosperity, communication and the social impact of core activities. This study uses (...) a comparative qualitative case approach to forest industry multinational enterprises (MNEs) based on a combination of secondary (reporting, company newsletters and other documentation) and interview data. Three large-scale multinational forest industry firms, all pursuing different strategies in terms of internationalisation and geographical and product diversification, were chosen for the study: Stora Enso, SCA and Sappi Ltd. Our results show that the overall quality of sustainability reporting has improved in these companies from 2005 to 2009 with the adoption of GRI. However, based on our fourfold categorisation of social impact, the core social impact indicator in GRI (SO1) has been interpreted very differently in these MNEs, and the adoption of GRI has not actually much improved the comparability of the reports or transparency of practices. (shrink)

Nudging refers to the subtle design of the context of choice in a way that mobilises the unconscious mind and alters human behaviour predictably. Nudging has been criticised for entailing numerous practical and ethical problems, including manipulation, elitism and cultural insensitivity. To respond to the problems, participatory and deliberative procedures have been proposed that would enable the questioning of the power relations embedded in behavioural governance. Yet participation and deliberation are themselves characterised by unconscious behavioural influences. I argue that awareness (...) of the prevalence of unconscious behavioural influences in environmental governance is a prerequisite for tackling the complex practical and ethical issues of nudging. I show that unconscious behavioural influences permeate environmental governance and outline analytical approaches for revealing them. (shrink)

We examine recent evolution in corporate responsibility in the forest industry, an important natural‐resource‐based industry which is under rapid internationalisation and structural change under challenging financial pressures. We address two recent trends in corporate communication: corporate disclosure, that is the adoption of consistent external reporting standards [namely the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) ], and the growing awareness of engagement with and impact on local communities through philanthropy, generation of prosperity, communication and the social impact of core activities. This study uses (...) a comparative qualitative case approach to forest industry multinational enterprises (MNEs) based on a combination of secondary (reporting, company newsletters and other documentation) and interview data. Three large‐scale multinational forest industry firms, all pursuing different strategies in terms of internationalisation and geographical and product diversification, were chosen for the study: Stora Enso, SCA and Sappi Ltd. Our results show that the overall quality of sustainability reporting has improved in these companies from 2005 to 2009 with the adoption of GRI. However, based on our fourfold categorisation of social impact, the core social impact indicator in GRI (SO1) has been interpreted very differently in these MNEs, and the adoption of GRI has not actually much improved the comparability of the reports or transparency of practices. (shrink)

In this paper phenomenological descriptions of the experiential structures of suicidality and of self-determined behaviour are given; an understanding of the possible scopes and forms of lived self-determination in suicidal mental life is offered. Two possible limits of lived self-determination are described: suicide is always experienced as minimally self-determined, because it is the last active and effective behaviour, even in blackest despair; suicide can never be experienced as fully self-determined, even if valued as the authentic thing to do, because no (...) retrospective re-evaluation from some future vantage is possible. The phenomenological descriptions of the possible scope of lived self-determination in suicidality, presented in this paper, should prove to be extremely helpful in three different fields of interest: (a) ethical debates regarding the pros and cons of autonomous or heteronomous suicide; (b) clinical day-to-day practice with respect to treating suicidal people; (c) people who suffered a suicidal crisis, attempted suicide or lost loved ones through suicides. (155 words). (shrink)

Modern slavery is a major topic of concern in international law and global governance, in civil society, and in academic debates. Yet, what does modern slavery mean, and can its highly different forms be covered in a single concept? This paper discusses these questions in three steps: First, it develops common definitions of modern slavery. Second, it discusses critical rejections of these definitions. The two camps that adhere to the definitions of modern slavery, and that reject them, respectively, face certain (...) limits. In a third step, the paper takes up with the limits and the strengths of both. It suggests that the limits of definitions of modern slavery can be overcome by critical approaches; and that the limits of critical approaches can be overcome by definitions of modern slavery. The key is their integration into a human rights frame. Ultimately, the paper proposes an approach to modern slavery that neither relies on a binary distinction between slavery and non-slavery, nor does it strive for the abolishment of the concept of modern slavery. Rather, the paper calls for a normatively and contextually embedded approach within the human rights frame. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a phenomenological description of lived autonomy and describe possible alterations of lived autonomy associated with chronic depression as they relate to specific psychopathological symptoms. I will distinguish between two types of lived autonomy, a pre-reflective type and a reflective type, which differ with respect to the explicitness of the action that is willed into existence; and I will relate these types to the classical distinction between freedom of intentional action and freedom of the will. I (...) will then describe how a chronically depressed person habitually discloses her experiential workspace with an impaired scope of perceivable action-properties, and pre-reflectively values many of these perceived action-properties as demanding or devalues these properties as well as her own abilities and drive to perform the respective actions. These alterations, typically experienced in a passive manner, imply an impairment of both types of lived autonomy. Drawing on first-hand accounts, I will then argue that small islands of lived autonomy, even of the reflective type, are possible if the afflicted identifies with at least some of her ‘depressive disabilities’. Lastly, I will compare this manner of life-conduct with the constellation of includence, as described by Tellenbach, and discuss the limitations of this study. (shrink)

Let random vectors \ represent joint measurements of certain subsets \ of properties\ in different contexts\. Such a system is traditionally called noncontextual if there exists a jointly distributed set \ of random variables such that \ has the same distribution as \ for all \ A trivial necessary condition for noncontextuality and a precondition for many measures of contextuality is that the system is consistently connected, i.e., all \ measuring the same property \ have the same distribution. The contextuality-by-default (...) approach allows defining more general measures of contextuality that apply to inconsistently connected systems as well, but at the price of a higher computational cost. In this paper we propose a novel measure of contextuality that shares the generality of the CbD approach and the computational benefits of the previously proposed negative probability approach. The present approach differs from CbD in that instead of considering all possible joints of the double-indexed random variables \, it considers all possible approximating single-indexed systems \. The degree of contextuality is defined based on the minimum possible probabilistic distance of the actual measurements \ from \. We show that this measure, called the optimal approximation measure, agrees with a certain measure of contextuality of the CbD approach for all systems where each property enters in exactly two contexts. The OA measure can be calculated far more efficiently than the CbD measure and even more efficiently than the NP measure for sufficiently large systems. We also define a variant, the OA-NP measure of contextuality that agrees with the NP measure for consistently connected systems while extending it to inconsistently connected systems. (shrink)