Of recent time, there has been a proliferation of concerns with ethical leadership within corporate business not least because of the numerous scandals at Enron, Worldcom, Parmalat, and two major Irish banks – Allied Irish Bank (AIB) and National Irish Bank (NIB). These have not only threatened the position of many senior corporate managers but also the financial survival of some of the companies over which they preside. Some authors have attributed these scandals to the pre-eminence of a focus on (...) increasing shareholder value in Western business schools and/or to their failure to inculcate ethical standards. In this paper, we challenge these accounts and the aetiological view of knowledge from which they derive but are grateful for the consensus that they convey regarding the importance of business ethics. The paper focuses on different approaches to ethical leadership concluding with a view that some hybrid of MacIntyre’s virtue ethics and Levinas’s ethics of responsibility may serve as an inspiration for both educators and practitioners. (shrink)

This paper provides a detailed study of fraud in practice through an empirical investigation of B.P.Sayers, a family-owned stockbroking firm that had been in existence for over 100 years and that collapsed due to the fraudulent activities of the firm's junior partner. An interpretive narrative methodology has been employed which has resulted in the development of a detailed understanding of fraud and moral breakdown in organizations, resulting from a failure of responsibility that arises from a dysfunctional work identification and its (...) moral implications. In developing this account of fraud, the conceptual framework utilized is drawn from the moral philosophical work of Emmanuel Levinas who explicated how the breakdown of social relations of responsibility results, in turn, in moral breakdown. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 315-318 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Contemplation et Dialogue: Quelques Exemples de Dialogue Entre Spiritualitiés Après le Concile Vatican II The Ground We Share: Everyday Practice, Buddhist and Christian Contemplation et Dialogue: Quelques Exemples de Dialogue Entre Spiritualitiés Après le Concile Vatican II. By Katrin Amell. Studia Missionalia Upsaliensia LXX. Uppsala: The Swedish Institute of Missionary Research, 1998. 245 pp. ISBN 91-85424-50-1. The Ground (...) We Share: Everyday Practice, Buddhist and Christian. By Robert Aitken and David Steindl-Rast. Edited by Nelson Foster. Boston and London: Shambala, 1996. xviii + 233 pp. ISBN 1-57062-219-1. $15.00. Here are two meritorious and well-produced works devoted to the dialogue between Buddhism and Christianity. They also have in common a certain desultoriness which left me reflecting on the limits of the rhetoric of 'dialogue.' Having taken over from 'liberation' as a theological buzzword, 'dialogue' seems by now to have exhausted its usefulness. William James remarked that everything genuine will somewhere become a sham. Lip service to a vague ideal of dialogue becomes a substitute for the unmet challenge of Buddhist-Christian thought, and the less the dialogue is practiced the more its importance is verbally celebrated. The retention of the word 'dialogue' may even serve to keep the religious other at a comfortable distance: it is more reassuring to say, "Of course we are in dialogue with the Buddhists" than to say "We are facing up to the challenge Buddhist thought poses to Christian theology," for in the former statement the Buddhists remain conveniently located others, sitting across the table, rather than a troublesome, potentially subversive presence within our own intellectual world. [End Page 315]In their submission to the recent Roman synod of Asian bishops, the Japanese bishops made much of their commitment to interreligious dialogue, and this was acclaimed with enthusiasm. But the impression left by Karin Amell's book (a doctoral thesis in missiology) is that not very much is going on in this area in Japan, the country seen as "the promised land of dialogue" after Vatican II (p. 119). "One has the impression that it is an activity for a few specialists" (p. 145), leaving the ordinary faithful largely untouched. Amell apparently does not read Japanese, so there may be much that she has missed, yet for my part I can think of nothing to add to the factual content of her account. For the spiritual side of the encounter she focuses on three Japanese pioneers, now in their seventies (pp. 150-191): Kadowaki Kakichi, SJ, Okumura Ichiro, OCD, and Oshida Shigeto, OP. To what extent these men have succeeded in creating a widespread Catholic Zen culture remains unclear, but Amell believes the "dialogue of religious experience" is the most widespread form of Buddhist-Catholic interaction in Japan (p. 146). As to scholarship, which is not Amell's direct concern, one has the impression that everyone is too busy with church and university affairs to devote their time to this. The scholarly labors of Heinrich Dumoulin, for example, have not been continued by anyone else. Despite the work of a powerful Catholic foundation, the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture (p. 141), Buddhism does not seem to excite Catholic intellectuals in Japan. Japanese Catholics are a small community, numbering about half a million. But given the high number of theologians, clergy and religious (p. 137), one would expect a more intensive interaction with local religious traditions. Instead the focus of theological interest remains fixed on Western sources. It is not so much that the situation of a small church in the midst of secularized-polytheistic-Buddhist Japan fails to give food for thought as that people seem afraid to think out its implications. Those engaged in contemplative sharing with Buddhists seem to avoid intellectual issues. Amell is uneasy with the insistence on intuition and the latent anti-intellectualism she finds in the intermonastic dialogue (discussed in the first half... (shrink)

Bioethics in a Liberal Societ By Max Charlesworth, Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. 172. ISBN 0?521?44952?9. £9.95 pbk. The Logical Universe: The Real Universe By Noel Curran Avebury, 1994. Pp. 158. ISBN 1?85628?863?3. £32.50. Beyond Postmodern Politics: Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault By Honi Fern Haber Routledge, 1994. Pp.viii + 160. ISBN 0?415?90823?X. $15.95. Baudrillard's Bestiary: Baudrillard and Culture By Mike Gane Routledge, 1991, Pp. 184. ISBN 0?415?06307?8. £10.99 pbk. Truth, Fiction and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective By Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom (...) Olsen Clarendon Press, 1994. Pp. 456. ISBN 0?19?824082?1. £45.00. Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination By David Loewenstein Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. x + 197. ISBN 0?521?37253?4. £25.00. Philosophy and Knowledge: A Commentary on Plato's Theaetetus Ronald M. Polansky Associated University Presses, 1992. Pp. 260. ISBN 0?8387?5215?2. £29.95. Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism and Being By Tom Rockmore Routledge, 1995. Pp. xx + 250. ISBN 0?415?11181?1. £14.99 pbk. Living Poetically: Kierkegaard's Existential Aesthetics By Sylvia Walsh The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Pp. 294. ISBN 0?271?01328?1. (shrink)

Psychiatry is rapidly adopting digital phenotyping and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to study mental illness based on tracking participants’ locations, online activity, phone and text message usage, heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and more. Existing ethical frameworks for return of individual research results (IRRs) are inadequate to guide researchers for when, if, and how to return this unprecedented number of potentially sensitive results about each participant’s real-world behavior. To address this gap, we convened an interdisciplinary expert working group, supported by (...) a National Institute of Mental Health grant. Building on established guidelines and the emerging norm of returning results in participant-centered research, we present a novel framework specific to the ethical, legal, and social implications of returning IRRs in digital phenotyping research. Our framework offers researchers, clinicians, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) urgently needed guidance, and the principles developed here in the context of psychiatry will be readily adaptable to other therapeutic areas. (shrink)

Readers expecting a history of nineteenth‐century pathology are in for a surprise. They will find instead a self‐conscious example of cultural studies, critical of some assumptions made in this field and of some feminist writing, but containing some alarming sentences like “My goal has been to give shape to the accidental palimpsests of an inveterately verbal, and increasingly visual, culture; to assemble a particular series of hermeneutic loose ends into a coherent account of how an extraordinarily bizarre system of signification (...) came into being” . With learned English like that, who needs Latin? But once we get into the main part of the book, things get much better. We are confronted with a study of the fringes of science, in popular writings, in literature, and in raree‐shows, one working from sources that the more austere scientifics of the Victorian period despised and that historians of science are prone to ignore. Metaphor and analogy are everywhere, and sensitive stomachs will be churned by vivid accounts of disease, deformity, and surgery.The first chapter is concerned with the cholera morbus, the plague of the nineteenth century, and with the way it could be perceived as an indicator of social ills. John Ruskin's word “illth” as an opposite of health is revived, and the terrible blackness of the shriveled and dehydrated victims of this disease imported from the East is linked with colonial and racist notions. The theme that a healthy body is like a well‐run state leads into the next chapter, on breast cancer. Surgery was not only agonizing but ineffective in the first half of the nineteenth century, but then the survival rate after three years rose gradually from 4.7 percent to 45 percent by 1900. O'Connor asks whether this saga, with cancer seen as cellular overproduction, reveals close connections with gender construction and the symbolic importance of breasts, concluding that it does not and that the language used really was neutral rather than sexual.She then looks at amputations and artificial limbs, seeing amputation as a threat to the whole masculine body that could be countered by prostheses almost undetectable to the observer. This allows reflection on illustration, where curiously disembodied hands are shown carrying out amputations; on dissembling and artificiality; on materialism; and on metaphors of wholeness and replacement and of extending senses and capacities. We see some extraordinary advertisements where men with artificial legs climb ladders and skate, perhaps on thin ice. The final chapter examines deformity, with monsters and freaks . P. T. Barnum is prominent here, but interesting links are also made to the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace and its successors and the numerous museums that were such a feature of the Victorian period. They are strikingly placed in a continuum, rather than opposed, in a discussion of chaos and order, capitalism and health, deformity and degeneration. Wonder is presented as the key to modern sensibility, and there is a nice quotation on page 152: “If Beauty and the Beast should be brought into competition in London at the present day, Beauty would stand no chance against the Beast in the race for popularity.” Readers will have been led into a fascinating world at the periphery of the respectable science that most of us study and will rejoice in the extraordinary sights they see. (shrink)

We generally accept that medicine’s conceptual and ethical foundations are grounded in recognition of personhood. With patients in vegetative state, however, we’ve understood that the ethical implications of phenomenal consciousness are distinct from those of personhood. This suggests a need to reconsider medicine’s foundations. What is the role for recognition of consciousness (rather than personhood) in grounding the moral value of medicine and the specific demands of clinical ethics? I suggest that, according to holism, the moral value of medicine is (...) secured when conscious states are recognized in everyday medical science. Moreover, consciousness fully motivates traditional principles of clinical ethics if we understand respect for autonomy as respect for the dominion of an experiencer in the private, inescapable realm of bodily experience. When medicine’s foundations are grounded in recognition of consciousness, we understand how patients fully command respect even when they lack capacity to exercise their bodily dominion through decision-making. (shrink)

Apocalyptic expectations of Armageddon and a New Age have been a fixture of the American cultural landscape for centuries. With the approach of the year 2000, such millennial visions seem once again to be increasing in popularity. Stephen O'Leary sheds new light on the age-old phenomenon of the End of the Age by proposing a rhetorical explanation for the appeal of millennialism. Using examples of apocalyptic argument from ancient to modern times, O'Leary identifies the recurring patterns in apocalyptic (...) texts and movements and shows how and why the Christian Apocalypse has been used to support a variety of political stances and programs. The book concludes with a critical review of the recent appearances of doomsday scenarios in our politics and culture, and a meditation on the significance of the Apocalypse in the nuclear age. Arguing the Apocalypse is the most thorough examination of its subject to date: a study of a neglected chapter of our religious and cultural history, a guide to the politics of Armageddon, and a map of millennial consciousness. (shrink)

Fascinating and well-documented in its details of cultural migration and evolution, this book offers a well-balanced perspective on the mutual influence of Arabic and Western worlds during the Middle Ages. It traces the transmission of Greek philosophy and science to the Islamic world, forming a portrait of medieval Muslim thought that illustrates its commonalities with Judaic and Christian teachings as well as its points of divergence. He shows how a particular type of Hellenistic culture made its way through the Syrian (...) Church, the Zoroastrians of Persia, and the pagans of Harran to the Islamic community, attaining its final metamorphosis in northeast Italy, where it constituted an anti-ecclesiastical influence that helped to pave the way for the Renaissance. Bibliography. Chronological Table. Index. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Religious Pluralism and Christian TruthJoseph S. O’Leary has been named recipient of the 1998 Frederick J. Streng Book Award for his 1996 volume, Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth. Dr. O’Leary was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1949. He studied literature, theology, and philosophy in Maynooth, Rome, and Paris. After teaching briefly in the United States (University of Notre Dame and Duquesne University), he moved to Japan in 1983. He (...) has worked in association with the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture and currently teaches English literature at Sophia University (with special emphasis on Joyce and the modernist period) and a course on Japanese values at International Christian University.He has been working on a trilogy in fundamental theology that has taken on an increasingly interreligious character. The first volume is Questioning Back: The Overcoming of Metaphysics in Christian Tradition (Minneapolis: Winston/Seabury, 1985), reviewed in Buddhist-Christian Studies in 1987; a French version is in preparation. The second volume appeared first as La verite chretienne a l’age du pluralisme religieux (Paris: Cerf, 1994) and then as Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth (Edinburgh University Press, 1996). Joseph O’Leary is also coeditor of Heidegger et la question de Dieu (Paris: Grasset, 1980) and Buddhist Spirituality (vols. 8 and 9 of World Spirituality, New York: Crossroad, 1993 and 1999).Terry Muck: Why did you write this book?Joseph O’Leary: My earlier book, Questioning Back: The Overcoming of Metaphysics in Christian Tradition, advocated deconstruction of the Greek and Hebrew elements in Christian theology—the need for a radical retrieval of the tradition in the spirit of Heidegger’s “step back” from metaphysical systems to the original phenomena. In Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth, I broadened the horizon to see all religion as historical, cultural constructs growing and changing through mutual interaction. Living in Japan brought me a liberating sense of historical and cultural relativity and with it the sense that the Christian tradition should be thought of as an essentially incomplete project, always reaching out to other traditions in search of a fuller vision.But that discovery did not mean giving up on the Christian tradition.No. Rather than sitting back and enjoying the pluralism, I found myself more and more concerned with the question of truth. Followers of Jacques Derrida assured me that “truth” has been exposed as a historical myth. Struggling with Derrida I found rather a recontextualization of the value of truth. Moreover, the “situated truth” (always relative to a given context in culture and praxis) of historically formulated dogmatic propositions turned out to be quite defensible despite Derrida’s demolition [End Page 239] of notions of truth as totality (Hegel) or truth as presence (Heidegger). Christianity has nothing to fear from opening itself up to its historical relativity. Buddhism has long accepted the provisionality of all religious expressions. I focused especially on the notion of skillful means and on the theory of the two truths (conventional and ultimate) in Madhyamaka Buddhism.What does this “opening up” do to traditional Christian doctrines?The notion of God is not only compatible with such a relativized view of the status of religious language, but demands it. The biblical discourse about God consists in a constant deconstruction of old images of God by new ones. As for the role of Jesus Christ, Incarnation is an ongoing event in that the historical significance of Jesus is still unfolding. The uniqueness of Jesus resides not in some ontological amalgamation of divinity and humanity but in the specifics of his historical role. God’s Word is spoken in other ways elsewhere, indeed is spoken in all things, and its specifically “fleshly” (human and historical) and “eschatological” manifestation in the unfolding of the Jesus story should not be divorced from these wider contexts.How have these ideas been received?The most flattering response has come from the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies in granting me the Frederick J. Streng Book Award. Streng’s book, Emptiness, which I read in Pittsburgh in 1982, opened my eyes to the world of Madhyamaka thought.Any criticisms?Predictably, the book has come under fire from two opposing camps. The Revue Thomiste reviewer claimed that I could... (shrink)

Arguing that psychologists and their predecessors have invariably relied on metaphors in articulation, the contributors to this volume offer a new "key" to understanding a critically important area of human knowledge by specifying the major metaphors.

The dominant managerial discipline in U.K. companies is finance. Accountants are often viewed as being concerned with what is measurable, definite and controllable. The emphasis is on professional conduct, independence, objectivity, technical competence and confidentiality. This paper explores the concept that the growth of professionalism has created an environment in which functional specialists have different ethical perspectives. The pre‐eminence of accountants is now being challenged by the marketers, a profession that takes a much wider view of business ethics. This development (...) is bound to have implications for corporate perspectives on business ethics. The paper gives the views of a focus group of managers from other disciplines on the relations between accountants and marketers, and analyses the potential for better understanding between the two groups and the implications of this for business ethics. (shrink)

Although vast and complex, the universe is orderly in many ways, and conditions at its beginning were right for the eventual evolution of life on this planet. But with life there is death, and with sentient life there is great pain and suffering, often with no apparent justification or purpose. Taking these things together, is it reasonable to conclude that the universe was brought about by God? Moreover, does the magnitude of seemingly pointless suffering square with the idea that God (...) exists, or is it good reason to think there is no God? These questions come up for many people, not just religious believers, and are examined in this engaging and thought-provoking book. Starting out with no pre-disposition to theism, atheism, or agnosticism, God, Evil, and Design takes up these questions in order to see where an impartial investigation leads. To achieve impartiality, the reader is invited to simulate ignorance insofar as his or her own religious preference is concerned. With this approach, God, Evil, and Design provides both a fresh look at important and controversial issues in philosophy and an excellent introduction to the contemporary debates surrounding them. Lively and non-technical, this book will be accessible to anyone with an interest in these topics. (shrink)

Tout s’est passé très vite, prenant l’Église au dépourvu. Le mouvement pour la reconnaissance des mariages et des unions civiles entre personnes du même sexe a connu un succès extraordinaire. La hiérarchie de l’Église catholique oppose une fin de non-recevoir à toute reconnaissance positive des couples homosexuels, en invoquant une morale sexuelle qu’on dit ancienne et invariable,..

This special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory considers the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement as an educational event, which has impacted attitudes and outlooks and conceptions of young people’s role, of education, and of society. This essay serves as an introduction to the more substantive pieces that follow. It describes two alternative perspectives on youth civic engagement in Hong Kong historically; and in so doing, it addresses some of the challenges related to free academic expression that hinder scholarly research and (...) publishing on the area of Hong Kong-China relations looking into the future. It concludes with a brief glimpse of the contributions that follow. (shrink)

This study addresses a range of central topics in Anglo-American philosophy of language.

This special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory considers the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement as an educational event, which has impacted attitudes and outlooks and conceptions of young people’s role, of education, and of society. This essay serves as an introduction to the more substantive pieces that follow. It describes two alternative perspectives on youth civic engagement in Hong Kong historically; and in so doing, it addresses some of the challenges related to free academic expression that hinder scholarly research and (...) publishing on the area of Hong Kong-China relations looking into the future. It concludes with a brief glimpse of the contributions that follow. (shrink)

This paper canvasses the various dimensions along which theories of truth may disagree about the extent to which truth is minimal.

(1996). Compatibilist semantics in metaphysics: A case study. Australasian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 74, No. 1, pp. 117-134. doi: 10.1080/00048409612347101.

Biomedical diagnostic science is a great deal less successful than we've been willing to acknowledge in bioethics, and this fact has far-reaching ethical implications. In this article I consider the surprising prevalence of medically unexplained symptoms, and the term's ambiguous meaning. Then I frame central questions that remain answered in this context with respect to informed consent, autonomy, and truth-telling. Finally, I show that while considerable attention in this area is given to making sure not to provide biological care to (...) patients without a need, comparatively little is given to the competing, ethically central task of making sure never to obstruct access to biological care for those with diagnostically confusing biological conditions. I suggest this problem arises from confusion about the philosophical value of vagueness when it comes to the line between biological and psychosocial needs. (shrink)

The need to address our question arises from two sources, one in Kant and the other in a certain type of response to so-called Reformed epistemology. The first source consists in a tendency to distinguish theoretical beliefs from practical beliefs , and to treat theistic belief as mere practical belief. We trace this tendency in Kant's corpus, and compare and contrast it with Aquinas's view and a more conservative Kantian view. We reject the theistic-belief-as-mere-practical-belief view: it is bad descriptive anthropology, (...) it embraces a misguided ideal of a fragmented self unattainable by human beings, and it will deter people from the most desirable sort of faith. The second source consists in the idea that since theistic beliefs function as answers to why-questions, their epistemic status hangs on whether they meet certain distinctively explanatory standards, whatever support they might receive from other sources. We argue that this is a non-sequitur and suggest questions for further research. (shrink)

The strongest version of the principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles states that of necessity, there are no distinct things with all their universals in common (where such putative haecceities as being Aristotle do not count as universals: I use 'universal' rather than 'property' here and in what follows for the simple reason that 'universal' is the term of art that most safely excludes haecceities from its instances). It is commonly supposed that Max Black's famous paper 'The identity of indiscernibles' (...) (2) refutes this thesis. (Armstong's [1], chapter 9 is representative here.) Black argues ([2], p. 156) that it is perfectly possible that there be a world consisting solely of two indiscernible spheres at some distance to each other and that this world constitutes a counterexample to the principle above. The strongest version of the bundle theory of substance claims that of necessity, the substances that make up the world are bundles of universals.1 It is commonly supposed that a consequence of Black's defeat of the principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles is that this bundle theory of substance is mistaken. (Again, Armstong's [1] is representative.) I shall argue that Black's thought experiment does not defeat the bundle theory and that, as a result, the bundle theory can be used to salvage the principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles. (shrink)

This book is of interest to those working at the intersection of contemporary debates in philosophy, ethics, politics and cultural studies.