In his book Reveille for Radicals, Saul Alinsky writes, "Most people are eagerly groping for... some way in which they can bridge the gap between their morals and their practices". Today, many consumers try to bridge that gap by participating in what has been termed ethical consumption: the intentional purchase of products and services that the customer considers to be ethically produced. But what happens if consumer perceptions do not match reality? This study investigates one aspect of ethical consumption by (...) examining consumer perceptions of the term cruelty free. Various definitions of this term exist, and companies can use the term when the product or its ingredients were indeed tested on animals. This exploratory study suggests that many consumers use this term as a moral heuristic in decision-making. As a result, the use of the term creates a halo effect that elevates brand perceptions. When provided with information suggesting the heuristic is flawed, consumers slightly alter perceptions but attitudes remain relatively strong. While some countries have implemented regulation regarding the use of the phrase in some contexts, results suggest that a broader policy is necessary to correct misperceptions and avoid misleading consumers. (shrink)

Sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) by United Nations (UN) peacekeepers causes severe physical and psychological consequences. Where SEA leads to pregnancy and childbirth, peacekeepers typically absolve themselves of their paternal responsibilities and paternity suits are largely unsuccessful. The lack of support for peacekeeper-fathered children (PKFC) tarnishes the image of the UN who fails to implement a victim-centred approach to SEA. Analysing shortcomings in the provision of support, this article presents an evaluation of the UN’s accountability system from the perspective of (...) PKFC families. In-depth interviews with thirty-five PKFC and sixty mothers demonstrate local barriers to child support and paternity claims in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. We discuss PKFC’s need for assistance and their mothers’ attempts to navigate an opaque international legal system. The findings cast light on their limited access to UN subsidies and offer recommendations to better implement existing UN goals of justice and victim-oriented policies. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

A response to a declaration in 'Le Monde', 'Luttons efficacement contre les théories du complot' by Gérald Bronner, Véronique Campion-Vincent, Sylvain Delouvée, Sebastian Dieguez, Karen Douglas, Nicolas Gauvrit, Anthony Lantian, and Pascal Wagner-Egger, published on June the 6th, 2016.

This paper presents a critical appraisal of the recent turn in comparative religious ethics to virtue theory; it argues that the specific aspirations of virtue ethicists to make ethics more contextual, interdisciplinary, and practice-centered has in large measure failed to match the rhetoric. I suggest that the focus on the category of the human and practices associated with self-formation along with a methodology grounded in “analogical imagination” has actually poeticized the subject matter into highly abstract textual studies on normative voices (...) within traditions, largely in isolation from considerations of socio-historical context, political and institutional pressures, and the lived ethics of non-elite moral actors. I conclude with some programmatic suggestions for how the field of comparative religious ethics can move forward. (shrink)

Both Watts and Beit-Hallahmi are enthusiastic about attachment theory as an important contribution to the psychology of religion, but they raise very different criticisms regarding other aspects of the book. I respond to Beit-Hallahmi by defending my assertion that a scientific approach to psychology of religion need not lead to the conclusion, nor rest on the premise, that the beliefs under study are ontologically false. I argue further that this "veridicality trap" has deep roots in prevailing, deeply mistaken assumptions about (...) how the mind/brain works, and show how an evolutionary approach clearly exposes such reasoning as fallacious and offers a powerful, alternative perspective on the problem. In response to Watts, I defend evolutionary psychology against the charge that it is not sufficiently empirical, and argue that the computational cognitive approach he prefers should be seen as complementary to an evolutionary approach rather than an alternative to it. (shrink)

Cool Characters tells the story of American political irony from World War II to the present: how irony came to seem politically subversive for American countercultural rebels; how mainstream culture allegedly co-opted countercultural irony; how irony became part of major critical theories of postmodernism; and how -- starting in the late 1980s -- innovative writers developed an idea of "postirony" with the hope of overcoming the political limitations of postmodern irony. To chart the shift from irony to postirony, and show (...) what relationship culture has to politics, the book offers intensive analyses of important American countercultural figures: the hipster, the punk, a figure the author calls "the believer," the coolhunter, and the occupier; and new interpretations of important works by Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Michael Muhammad Knight, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Alex Shakar, William Gibson, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Lethem, and Rachel Kushner."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

We investigate how two different types of conflict (task conflict and relationship conflict) at two different levels (individual-level and team-level) influence individual team commitment. The analysis was conducted using data we collected from 193 employees in 31 branch offices of a Korean commercial bank. The relationships at multiple levels were tested using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). The results showed that individual-level relationship conflict was negatively related to team commitment while individual-level task conflict was not. In addition, both team-level task and (...) relationship conflict were negatively associated with team commitment. Finally, only team-level relationship conflict significantly moderated the relationship between individual-level relationship conflict and team commitment. We further derive theoretical implications of these findings. (shrink)

이 논문은 데이빗 루이스의 시간적 부분 이론(temporal part theory)과 물질적 구성(material consitution)에 대한 반 인와겐의 입장에 대한 논의를 출발점으로 삼는다. 먼저 필자는 루이스의 시간적 부분이론을 반박한다. 루이스의 이론의 핵심적인 내용을 똑같이 반영(mirror)하면서도 그 이론과 상충하는 이론을 구성하고 이 두 이론 중 어느 한 쪽을 선택하는 것은 결국은 임의적인(arbitrary) 결정을 하는 것인데 이 사실은 이 두 이론 모두를 매력적이지 않게 만든다고 주장한다. 이 두 이론을 모두 거부한다면 우리는 사물을 (특별히 문제되는 사물이 ‘자아’라면 더더욱) 어디에 위치시켜야 하는지 새로운 가능성을 탐색해 보게 된다. (...) 다음으로 이 논문은 떨어지지 않은 임의적인 부분(arbitrary undetached part)에 대한 반 인와 겐의 논증을 살펴보고 그 논증을 준거점으로 삼아 물질적 구성(material consitution)에 대한 여러 논문들에 등장한 이론적 가능성을 일별한다. 필자는 이 여러 입장들 뒤에 근본적인 전제로 기능하고 있는 철학적 원자론(philosophical atomism)과 그 이론이 내포하는 환원주의적 접근이 자아가 존재하고 시간 속에 지속한다(endure through time)는 근본적인 믿음을 포함하는 ‘자아의 선차성’ 논제를 위협한다는 것을 지적하고 루이스의 이론에 대한 논의에서 얻은 결론과 결합하여, 상당히 이상해보이지만 고려해볼만한 이론적 가능성으로 자아가 시간 속에 지속하는 영차원의(zero-dimensional) 존재라는 가능성을 제기한다. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the Timaeus, Plato explicitly defines time as “the moving image of eternity”. This proposition affirms actually that time reflects the eternal that embodies the rational and lawful principle – namely the logos of proportionality – in the motion and change of visible objects in the universe. In other words,time determines the principle that every mutable being must follow to participate in the rational and nomological order of existence; the absolute logos which is given by God is hence intrinsic to (...) time. This idea of time is echoed by the theories of Augustine and Husserl. Both philosophers inherited some of Plato’s metaphysical views, and each of them developed a distinctive theory of the relations between Being, time, and the absolute logos. This paper attempts to compare their theories and to defend the following claim: Augustine fo-cuses on the immutable representation of time which is regarded as the image or reflection of God’s absolute logos, and explains temporal phenome... (shrink)

In the following essay, I argue for an alternative anthropocentrism that, eschewing failed appeals to traditional moral principle, takes (a) as its point of departure the cognitive, perceptual, emotive, somatic, and epistemic conditions of our existence as members of Homo sapiens, and (b) one feature of our experience of/under these conditions particularly seriously as an avenue toward articulating this alternative, the capacity for aesthetic appreciation. To this end, I will explore, but ultimately reject philosopher Allen Carlson's ecological aesthetics, and I (...) will adopt with modification aspects of the work of Ronnie Hawkins, Val Plumwood, and Donna Haraway. My central claim is that, equipped with a better understanding of our interdependent relationship to/within human and nonhuman nature, an understanding made especially available to those who occupy situations imbued by subjugation, we can come to understand our human-centeredness not as a justification of entitlement, but as an opportunity for critical self-reflection upon those actions which endanger the ecological conditions of human and nonhuman being. I suggest, then, that developing criteria for an aesthetic appreciation ground in such a centeredness can make a vital contribution to a more ecologically defensible moral and political activism. (shrink)

Where Taber and Lodge view belief polarization to indicate a “partisan motivation,” Lord et al. (1979) believed it to be consistent with a desire for accuracy: A “weak” study articulating an opposing viewpoint might simply sharpen participants' initial belief of the wisdom of their prior beliefs. This polarization, Taber and Lodge show, correlates with political sophistication: The more partisan a participant, the more time spent reading the opinions of the other side—in order to critically refute them. Taber and Lodge attribute (...) such findings to people's personal identification with their beliefs. However, participants may have spent so much time reading opinions of the other side because the arguments are unfamiliar. Further, Lord et al. (1984) were able to induce people to act with “skepticism” toward their own views by simply suggesting that they “consider the other side.”. (shrink)

Nearly every day we participate in the vast, interconnected global economy. In doing so, we engage in chains of transactions that ultimately result in our benefiting from, or enabling, wrongdoing by others. In some cases this seems to be in itself wrong, but in many cases it seems unproblematic. I develop a concept of ‘ethical distance’ and argue that our responsibility for the wrongdoing of others is a function of our ethical distance from it. Furthermore, I argue that the concept (...) of moral responsibility is vague, but that when we become clearly responsible for wrongdoing by others, we ought to sever our connection to it. (shrink)

The emphasis on evidence based medicine (EBM) has placed increased focus on finding timely answers to clinical questions in presence of patients. Using a combination of natural language processing for the generation of clinical excerpts and information theoretic distance based clustering, we evaluated multiple approaches for the efficient presentation of context-sensitive EBM excerpts.

Popper Proposed the criterion of falsifiability as a solution to the problem of demarcation i.e. of distinguishing science from pseudo-science and not, as many of his contemporaries in the Vienna Circle mistook it to be, a solution to the quite different problem with which they themselves were preoccupied, viz. of providing a criterion of meaning to distinguish the meaningful from the meaningless. While the positivists were concerned to damn metaphysics and exalt science, by identifying the empirically verifiable with the meaningful, (...) Popper was concerned to separate science from scientism, to damn astrology and to extol astronomy. In other words his preoccupation belongs not to the philosophy of language but to the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Without doubt, Weighing Lives, like its precursor, Weighing Goods, is an excellent and thought-provoking piece of work. In the first place, it addresses a question of the most fundamental importance, namely: how should we aggregate the well-being of past, present and future members of the human race under the various possible states of the world that may, in the event, prevail? This involves, amongst other things, dealing with questions of aggregation across time, people and different states of the world; the (...) issue of what constitutes a “neutral” state of well-being and what is, in fact, the value of continuing to survive. (shrink)

The irreversibility effect implies that a decision maker who neglects the prospect of receiving more complete information at later stages of a sequential decision problem will in certain cases too easily take an irreversible decision, as he ignores the existence of a positive option value in favour of reversible decisions. This option value represents the decision maker's flexibility to adapt subsequent decisions to the obtained information. In this paper we show that the economic models dealing with irreversibility as used in (...) environmental and capital investment decision making can be extended to emergency response decisions that produce important irreversible effects. In particular, we concentrate on the decision whether or not to evacuate an industrial area threatened by a possible nuclear accident. We show in a simple two-period evacuation decision model that non-optimal conclusions may be drawn when evacuation is regarded as a `now or never decision'. The robustness of these results is verified by means of a sensitivity analysis of the various model parameters. The importance of `options thinking' in this decision context is illustrated in an example. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to introduce an original and radical phenomenology of life into Heidegger’s earliest lectures at Freiburg University. The motivation behind this aim lies in the exclusion of life from the existential analytic despite Heidegger’s preoccupation with the question of life during this very early period. Principally, the essay demonstrates how Husserl’s phenomenological insight into the intentionality of life has the potential to be transformed into a living aporia. Although this demonstration is set within the general (...) context of obtaining knowledge in and of life, it is achieved via a reciprocal critique of the possibility of a philosophy of life and Husserlian phenomenology to reveal the congruence life philosophy has with the project of phenomenology. In contrast to fundamental ontology, the essay ends by exposing Heidegger’s latent and inexplicit formulation of phenomenology in terms of a radical correlation that holds aporetically between living and unliving experience. (shrink)

of (from British Columbia Philosophy Graduate Conference) In response to the “Causal Drainage” objection to his Supervenience Argument, Kim introduces micro-based properties and argues that their presence prohibits any causal drainage between metaphysical levels. Noordhof disagrees and instead argues that the causal powers of the �micro-bases� of micro-based properties seem to preempt the causal powers of micro-based properties, in much the same way as Kim claims the powers of subvening base properties preempt the powers of supervenient properties. Thus Noordhof argues (...) that the causal powers of higher-level micro-based properties still seem to drain downward to their lower-level micro-bases. In this paper I will defend Noordhof and argue that in fact this drainage is due to the fact that micro-based properties seem to supervene on their micro-bases. I thus argue that micro-based properties fall victim to the very same Supervenience Argument that Kim himself presents and I conclude that even micro-based properties turn out to be causally impotent if Kim�s Supervenience Argument is sound. (shrink)