The Australian state of Victoria legalised voluntary assisted dying in June 2019. Like most jurisdictions with legalised VAD, the Victorian law constructs physicians as the only legal providers of VAD. Physicians with conscientious objection to VAD are not compelled to participate in the practice, requiring colleagues who are willing to participate to transact the process for eligible applicants. Physicians who provide VAD because of their active, moral and purposeful support for the law are known as conscientious participants. Conscientious participation has (...) received scant attention in the bioethics literature. Patient access to VAD is contingent on the development of a sufficient corpus of conscientious participants in permissive jurisdictions. This article reports the findings of a small empirical study into how some Victorian physicians with no in-principle opposition towards the legalisation of VAD, are ethically orientating themselves towards the law, in the first 8 months of the law’s operation. It finds that in-principle-supportive physicians employ bioethical principles to justify their position but struggle to reconcile that approach with the broader medical profession’s opposition. This study is part of the first tranche of empirical research emerging from Australia since the legalisation of VAD in that country for the first time in over 20 years. (shrink)

Two core motivational systems have been conceptualized as underlying emotion and behavior. The approach system drives the organism toward stimuli or events in the environment, and the avoidance system instead deters the organism away from these stimuli or events. This approach—avoidance dichotomy has been central to theories of emotion. Advances in neuroscience complementing well-designed behavioral experiments have begun to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying approach—avoidance motivation, suggesting that these two systems exist in parallel and are lateralized in the brain. This (...) review explores the notion of approach—avoidance and the cerebral lateralization of these motivational tendencies. (shrink)

The Meditations, a bedside book of reflections and self-admonitions, give unique access to the mind of an ancient ruler. In this study they are made more approachable to the modern reader, through explanations of the historical and philosophical background, and the main themes of the emperor's thought.

At the center of many critiques of liberalism is liberal neutrality, which is attacked on two fronts. First, it is argued that neutrality yields a restrictive sphere of public reason. Contentious views—like those endorsed by citizens with marginalized comprehensive doctrines—are outlawed from public consideration. Second, state policies must have neutral effects, lest they differentially impact those with unpopular views. Contentious state actions—like those endorsed by citizens with marginalized moral views—are outlawed from implementation. It is this combination of demands for neutrality (...) at the individual and state levels that produces the concern: if marginalized comprehensive doctrines cannot be discussed in the realm of public reason, and if marginalized moral views cannot be acted upon by the state, how will we ever achieve the goals of feminism, itself a marginalized moral view? Does liberal neutrality prohibit progress toward gender equality? In this paper, I argue to the contrary. Many objections regarding liberalism’s supposed failure to secure gender justice rely on a conception of neutrality as neutrality of effect. But at both the individual and state levels, liberalism’s demand for neutrality is about justification. Liberalism, specifically political liberalism, requires neither neutral content of public reasons nor neutral effects of state policies. (shrink)

The Management by Objective (MBO) system was widely discredited by the 1980s as not delivering on its promises of efficiency, worker motivation, etc. Now some universities around the world seek to employ such a system for faculty evaluation. This paper comments on the reasons the MBO was largely abandoned in the business world, provides the use of the MBO in Korean education as a case study of current use, and gives suggestions of the conditions under which the MBO or similar (...) evaluation systems would likely be disastrous in an academic environment. This is followed by a series of criteria that a fair and equitable faculty evaluation system should have. (shrink)

The ancient Stoics had an uneven track record with regard to women’s standing. On the one hand, they recognized women as fully capable of rationality and virtue. On the other hand, they continued to hold that women’s roles were in the home. These views are consistent, given Stoic value theory, but are unacceptable on liberal feminist grounds. Stoic value theory, given different emphasis on the ethical role of choice, is shown to be capable of satisfying the liberal feminist requirement that (...) autonomy must be respected. In turn, a model for Stoic feminism is proposed. (shrink)

Growing inequality and its implications for democratic polity suggest that corporate social responsibility has not proved itself in twenty-first century business, largely as it lacks clear criteria of demarcation for businesses to follow. Today the problem is viewed by many commentators as an ethical challenge to business itself. In response to this challenge, we begin by examining Porter and Kramer’s :64–77, 2011) call for a shift from a social responsibility to a shared value framework and the need to respond to (...) the problem of the ‘separation thesis’ between business and ethics :89–118, 1996; Harris and Freeman, Bus Ethics Q 18:541–548, 2008). We identify the eighteenth century economist and philosopher Adam Smith in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments as a source for an ethical approach to business. Building on his central concept of ‘sympathy’, we introduce the idea of the Impartial Spectator Test, which we argue builds on traditional stakeholder perspectives and which provides an objective route to ethical criteria of demarcation. We conclude by assessing how this approach adds to the existing debate around social responsibility and shared value. (shrink)

In the name of hybridity and of « cultural difference », contrasted here from « cultural diversity », the author proposes a critique of the relativist liberalism which currently justifies the « multiculturalist » policies favoured in the UK, showing how such policies are linked with an ethnocentered form of universalism.

This study builds on prior research investigating the antecedents of firm supererogation. Examining vehicle recalls in the U.S. automobile industry from 1966 to 2010 reveals that surveillance-based government enforcement programs can have widespread industry effects on a specific type of supererogatory action, firm volunteerism. Specifically, increases in government surveillance are associated with firms going beyond what is legally required of them by initiating voluntary product recalls for defects not covered in existing government regulation. Such effects are shown to be unique (...) among surveillance efforts as other government enforcement activities, such as standards-based regulation, are revealed to have a negative association with firm supererogation. (shrink)

Skepticism is one of the most enduring and profound of philosophical problems. With its roots in Plato and the Sceptics to Descartes, Hume, Kant and Wittgenstein, skepticism presents a challenge that every philosopher must reckon with. In this outstanding collection philosophers engage with skepticism in five clear sections: the philosophical history of skepticism in Greek, Cartesian and Kantian thought; the nature and limits of certainty; the possibility of knowledge and related problems such as perception and the debates between objective knowledge (...) and constructivism; the transcendental method as a response to skepticism and the challenge of naturalism; overcoming the skeptical challenge. (shrink)

We examine the role of managers in controlling the positive impact of stakeholder management (SM) on firm financial performance (FP) in the long term. We develop and test competing hypotheses on whether managers act as “good citizens” or engage in “self‐dealing” when allowed greater discretion. We test our assertions using dynamic panel data analysis of a sample of 806 U.S. public firms operating in 34 industries over 5 years (2005–2009). Our results indicate a nuanced influence of managerial discretion contexts on (...) the SM‐FP relationship. We infer that given more latitude in decision making, as long as the “going is good” managers act as good citizens, but otherwise they revert to managerial self‐dealing. In light of our results, firms designing governance mechanisms to encourage managers to balance the needs of both shareholders and stakeholders must remain cognizant of contextual contingencies. (shrink)

This is the most up-to-date and comprehensive interpretation of the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Amongst its other virtues, it makes considerable use of unpublished manuscript sources. The book seeks to demonstrate the systematic unity of Leibniz's thought, in which theodicy, ethics, metaphysics and natural philosophy cohere. The key, underlying idea of the system is the conception of nature as an order designed by God to maximise the opportunities for the exercise of reason. From this idea emerges the view that (...) this world is the best of all possible worlds, and an ethical ideal in which the well-being of human beings is promoted through the gradual extension of intellectual enlightenment. (shrink)

Leibniz's well-known thesis that the actual world is just one among many possible worlds relies on the claim that some possibles are incompossible , meaning that they cannot belong to the same world. Notwithstanding its central role in Leibniz's philosophy, commentators have disagreed about how to understand the compossibility relation. We examine several influential interpretations and demonstrate their shortcomings. We then sketch a new reading, the cosmological interpretation, and argue that it accommodates two key conditions that any successful interpretation must (...) satisfy. (shrink)

This article utilizes the lens of disposability to explore recent conditions of low-wage temporary migrant labour, whose numbers and economic sectors have expanded in the 21stcentury. A central argument is that disposability is a discursive and material relation of power that creates and reproduces invidious distinctions between the value of “legitimate” Canadian settler-citizens and the lack of worth of undesirable migrant populations working in Canada, often for protracted periods of time. The analytical lens of migrant disposability draws upon theorizing within (...) Marxian, critical modernity studies, and decolonizing settler colonial frameworks. This article explores the technologies of disposability that lay waste to low wage workers in sites such as immigration law and provincial/territorial employment legislation, the workplace, transport, living conditions, access to health care and the practice of medical repatriation of injured and ill migrant workers. The mounting evidence that disposability is immanent within low-wage migrant labour schemes in Canada has implications for migrant social justice. The failure to protect migrant workers from a vast array of harms reflects the historical foundations of Canada’s contemporary migrant worker schemes in an “inherited background field [of settler colonialism] within which market, racist, patriarchal and state relations converge”. Incremental liberal reform has made little headway insofar as the administration and in some cases reversal of more progressive reforms such as guaranteed pathways to citizenship prioritize employers’ labour interests and the lives and health of primarily white, middle class Canadian citizens at the expense of a shunned and racialized but growing population of migrants from the global South. Transformational change and social justice for migrant workers can only occur by reversing the disposability and hyper-commodification intrinsic to low-wage migrant programs and granting full permanent legal status to migrant workers. (shrink)

Arranged in the form of a phenomenology, the work deals with such matters as the veneration of the environment; carved images of the divine; the orisha ...

This book examines and compares the two major traditions of institutionalist thinking in economics: the 'old' institutionalism of Veblen, Mitchell, Commons, and Ayres, and the 'new' institutionalism developed more recently from neoclassical and Austrian sources and including the writings of Coase, Williamson, North, Schotter, and many others. The discussion is organized around a set of key methodological, theoretical, and normative problems that necessarily confront any attempt to incorporate institutions into economics. These are identified in terms of the issues surrounding the (...) use of formal or non-formal analytical methods, individualist or holistic approaches, the respective roles of rational choice and rule-following behavior, the relative importance of the spontaneous evolution and deliberative design of institutions, and questions concerning the normative appraisal of institutions. The old and the new institutionalism have often been paired on opposite sides of these issues, and the issues themselves presented in a series of sharp dichotomies. Professor Rutherford argues, however, that matters are both more complex and more challenging. Although each tradition embodies fascinating insights into the study of economic institutions - their functioning, evolution, and impact on human welfare - neither has as yet provided fully satisfactory answers to the problems identified. (shrink)

This volume is a critical edition of the ten-year correspondence between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, one of Europe’s most influential early modern thinkers, and Bartholomew Des Bosses, a Jesuit theologian who was keen to bring together Leibniz’s philosophy and the Aristotelian philosophy and religious doctrines accepted by his order. The letters offer crucial insights into Leibniz’s final metaphysics and into the intellectual life of the eighteenth century. Brandon C. Look and Donald Rutherford present seventy-one of Leibniz’s and Des Bosses’s letters (...) in the original Latin and in careful English translation. Few of the letters have been translated into English before. The editors also provide extensive annotations, deletions, and marginalia from Leibniz’s various drafts, and a substantial introduction setting the context for the correspondence and analyzing the main philosophical issues. (shrink)

This book is not a study of Plato's philosophy, but a contribution to the literary interpretation of the dialogues, through analysis of their formal structure, ...

This chapter examines the views of seventeenth-century British philosophers on the relation between virtue and hedonism, explaining that many philosophers believed that a defense of virtue required rejection of hedonism. It discusses the reformulation of moral philosophy proposed by Thomas Hobbes, and analyzes the reactions of Richard Cumberland and Cambridge Platonists Ralph Cudworth and Henry More. The chapter also considers the revival of Epicureanism and early modern natural law theory.

The revival of Leibniz studies in the past twenty-five years has cast important new light on both the context and content of Leibniz's philosophical thought. Where earlier English-language scholarship understood Leibniz's philosophy as issuing from his preoccupations with logic and language, recent work has recommended an account on which theological, ethical, and metaphysical themes figure centrally in Leibniz's thought throughout his career. The significance of these themes to the development of Leibniz's philosophy is the subject of increasing attention by philosophers (...) and historians. This collection of new essays by a distinguished group of scholars offers an up-to-date overview of the current state of Leibniz research. In focusing on nature and freedom, the volume revisits two key topics in Leibniz's thought, on which he engaged both contemporary and historical arguments. Important contributions to Leibniz scholarship in their own right, these articles collectively provide readers a framework in which to better situate Leibniz's distinctive philosophy of nature and the congenial home for a morally significant freedom that he took it to provide. (shrink)

Abstract Nietzsche defends an ideal of freedom as the achievement of a ?higher human being?, whose value judgments are a product of a rigorous scrutiny of inherited values and an expression of how the answers to ultimate questions of value are ?settled in him?. I argue that Nietzsche's view is a recognizable descendent of ideas advanced by the ancient Stoics and Spinoza, for whom there is no contradiction between the realization of freedom and the affirmation of fate, and who restrict (...) this freedom to rare individuals, who escape the bondage of conventional mores and passive emotional states. Although Nietzsche rejects key assumptions made by both the Stoics and Spinoza, his outlook is an extension of their efforts to elaborate the notion of freedom as an ideal. (shrink)

(1999). Salvation as a state of mind: The place of acquiescentia in spinoza's ethics. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 447-473. doi: 10.1080/09608789908571039.