In this essay, we focus on Max Weber’s concept of rationalization to understand and make sense of the rise of bureaucratic, corporate governance and online learning in higher education. We reveal the distinct disconnect between human interaction and online platforms and how such disconnection is antithetical to higher learning. We also show how Weber’s analysis helps us recognize the uniquely crass commercialism embedded in the very rationalization that makes online learning in universities thinkable and actionable. Our use of online learning (...) is only one illustration of Weber’s concept of rationalization, but it provides an important understanding of the nefarious effects rationalization has on human interaction. The nexus of marketization, technology, and higher education represents, on our view, a juggernaut against faculty autonomy, academic freedom, and humane learning and should be directly challenged. One difficulty this challenge faces is the degree to which online learning has become ubiquitous and taken-for-granted. It has, as Weber clarifies, been rationalized. (shrink)

This book is a study of ancient views about 'moral luck'. It examines the fundamental ethical problem that many of the valued constituents of a well-lived life are vulnerable to factors outside a person's control, and asks how this affects our appraisal of persons and their lives. The Greeks made a profound contribution to these questions, yet neither the problems nor the Greek views of them have received the attention they deserve. This book thus recovers a central dimension of Greek (...) thought and addresses major issues in contemporary ethical theory. One of its most original aspects is its interrelated treatment of both literary and philosophical texts. The Fragility of Goodness has proven to be important reading for philosophers and classicists, and its non-technical style makes it accessible to any educated person interested in the difficult problems it tackles. This new edition features an entirely new preface by Martha Nussbaum. (shrink)

A revolutionary new theory and call to action on animal rights, ethics, and law from the renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum.

ABSTRACT Unexpected but vivid and compelling memories are a wide‐spread experience in late life. The experience has often been described in literature, and in recent years has been the object of extensive gerontological research under the label ‘life review’. Such memories often include a reversal of judgment about a past act, relationship, event, etc. What earlier was judged to be so is, in the retrospect of late life, judged not to have been so after all. This presents a question: which (...) judgment—the earlier or the later—has better epistemological credentials in such cases? Some obvious possible answers are considered and rejected. It would seem that the issue is not resolvable on epistemological grounds. A parallel dilemma seems to appear in other dimensions of experience. An example from aesthetic experience is briefly considered. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) crisis provoked an organizational ethics dilemma: how to develop ethical pandemic policy while upholding our organizational mission to deliver relationship- and patient-centered care. Tasked with producing a recommendation about whether healthcare workers and essential personnel should receive priority access to limited medical resources during the pandemic, the bioethics department and survey and interview methodologists at our institution implemented a deliberative approach that included the perspectives of healthcare professionals and patient stakeholders in the policy development process. Involving (...) the community more, not less, during a crisis required balancing the need to act quickly to garner stakeholder perspectives, uncertainty about the extent and duration of the pandemic, and disagreement among ethicists about the most ethically supportable way to allocate scarce resources. This article explains the process undertaken to garner stakeholder input as it relates to organizational ethics, recounts the stakeholder perspectives shared and how they informed the triage policy developed, and offers suggestions for how other organizations may integrate stakeholder involvement in ethical decision-making as well as directions for future research and public health work. (shrink)

In this paper, we outline some of the connections between the literatures of organizational storytelling, spirituality in the workplace, organizational culture, and authentic leadership. We suggest that leader storytelling that integrates a moral and spiritual component can transform an organizational culture so members of the organization begin to feel connected to a larger community and a higher purpose. We specifically discuss how leader role modeling in authentic storytelling is essential in developing an ethically and spiritually based organizational culture. However, we (...) also acknowledge a potential dark side to leader storytelling. Implications for authentic storytelling research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Shepherd propounds a theory of mind with a fair claim to be better than Hume’s at explaining the sources of commonly held human beliefs about causal necessity due largely to her relational theory of sense perception. In comparison with Hume’s account, it incorporates a more sophisticated treatment of mental representation, especially the role of relational structure and logical form. Most important, perhaps, Shepherd’s theory enforces the division, obscured by Hume, between the evidence of necessity and the metaphysical foundation of necessity.

We systematically examined the content of the websites of 46 agencies that buy and sell human eggs to understand how they market themselves to both donors and recipients. We found that these websites use marketing techniques that obscure the realities of egg donation, presenting egg donation as a mutually beneficial and fulfilling experience. Sites emphasize egg donors' emotional fulfillment and address recipients' anxieties by stressing the ability to find the perfect “fit” or “match”, suiting recipients’“preferences”/“desires”, and even designing/customizing a child. (...) Agencies attempt to create a sense of connection between the recipients and donors by reporting donors' personal characteristics — e.g., interests/hobbies, traits, mood/temperament, and self-reported childhood behavior/memories. Sites present donors as caring/generous and smart/successful/beautiful. These data, the first to examine several key aspects of egg donation agency websites, reveal critical aspects of how these companies communicate to prospective donors and recipients, raising several ethical concerns. Websites frame information in ways that may bias consumers, making emotional appeals that may distract from appropriate risk/benefit assessments and obscure the ethical challenges of egg donation. These data highlight needs for improved practices, adherence to guidelines, and consideration of enhanced guidelines or policy. (shrink)

Ethics training has been highlighted as essential for building and fostering business ethics in organizations. National and international trends show that over 40% of businesses have some form of business ethics training. We use data collected from 199 firms to examine the presence of ethics training in top Canadian companies and found that the presence varied by region and firm size, and that the Canadian average (35%) lags other countries.

Using data collected from 280 full-time employees from a variety of organizations, this study examined the effects of employee perceptions of the behavioral integrity (BI) of their supervisors on job tension. The moderating effect of procedural justice (PJ) on this relationship also was examined. Substitutes for leadership theory (Kerr and Jermier, 1978) and psychological contract theory (Rousseau, Empl Responsib Rights J 2:121–139, 1989) were used as the theoretical foundations for the hypothesized relationships. Results indicated a negative relationship between BI and (...) job tension. PJ moderated this relationship such that it was weakened under conditions of high PJ. Implications for research and managers are discussed. (shrink)

Visual Agnosia is a comprehensive and up-to-date review of disorders of higher vision that relates these disorders to current conceptions of higher vision from cognitive science, illuminating both the neuropsychological disorders and the nature of normal visual object recognition.Brain damage can lead to selective problems with visual perception, including visual agnosia the inability to recognize objects even though elementary visual functions remain unimpaired. Such disorders are relatively rare, yet they provide a window onto how the normal brain might accomplish the (...) complex task of vision. Visual Agnosia reviews a century of case studies of higher-level visual deficits following brain damage, places them in the general context of current neuroscience, and draws relevant conclusions about the organization of normal visual processing. It is unique in drawing on research in cognitive psychology, computational vision, visual neurophysiology, and neuropsychology to interpret the agnosias and draw inferences from them about visual object recognition.Following a historical account of agnosia research, Visual Agnosia offers a taxonomy of a wide range of agnosia syndromes, describing and interpreting the syndromes in terms of the latest theoretical models of visual processing and ultimately bringing them to bear as evidence on a variety of questions in the study of higher vision.Martha J. Farah is Associate Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Visual Agnosia is included in the Issues in Biology of Language and Cognition series, edited by John Marshall. (shrink)

How people react emotionally to the positive or negative events that they experience in their lives depends in part on whether particular outcomes are perceived to be deserved or undeserved. For ex...

The ethics of Aristotle , and virtue ethics in general, have enjoyed a resurgence of interest over the past few decades. Aristotelian themes, with such issues as the importance of friendship and emotions in a good life, the role of moral perception in wise choice, the nature of happiness and its constitution, moral education and habituation, are finding an important place in contemporary moral debates. Taken together, the essays in this volume provide a close analysis of central arguments in Aristotle's (...) Nicomachean Ethics and show the enduring interest of the questions Aristotle raises. (shrink)

Many on the contemporary Left assume that the Right has irrevocably taken control of cyberspace. Many believe that the terrain of online memetic discourse, from 4chan to Russian interference in the 2016 election via social media, is now the domain of trolls, fascists, and neo-Nazis. In this article, Gabriel Keehn argues against that assumption, tracing the ways in which the Right won the meme war and arguing for the educative and liberatory potential of a left counteroffensive in this still (...) contested space. (shrink)

The biology of early life adversity explores how social experiences early in life affect physical and psychological health and well-being throughout the life course. In our previous work, we argued that narratives emerging from and about this research field tend to focus on harm and lasting damage with little discussion of reversibility and resilience. However, as the Science and Technology Studies literature has demonstrated, scientific research can be actively taken up and transformed as it moves through social worlds. Drawing on (...) fieldwork with actors in education and juvenile corrections in the US Pacific Northwest, we found that they employed the biology of early life adversity not only to promote prevention but also to argue for changes within their own institutions that would allow them to better serve children and youth who have experienced adversity and trauma. Our study shows that biosocial narratives are neither inherently liberatory nor inherently oppressive but that the situated narrative choreographies in which they are enrolled are essential for their political effects. In our case, we show how these biosocial narratives have been articulated with knowledge and practices from restorative justice and trauma-informed care to reimagine the social meaning of the biology of early life adversity. (shrink)

This paper argues that Locke has a representative theory of sensitive knowledge. Perceivers are immediately aware of nothing but sensory ideas in the mind; yet perceivers think of real external substances that correspond to and cause those ideas, and they are warranted in believing that those substances exist (at that time). The theory poses two questions: what warrants the truth of such beliefs? What is it in virtue of which sensory ideas represent external objects and how do they make perceivers (...) think of those objects? Both the epistemic and semantic issues need to be addressed. This paper urges that Locke's basic account of warrant is roughly reliabilist. The causal origin of sensory ideas assures that, in general, sense based beliefs are true. Locke defines the limit of this warrant by the theoretical point that we cannot discuss skeptical doubt without assuming the truthfulness of our perceptual faculty. Turning to the semantic question, the paper argues that ideas are mental modifications or entities. They are not intrinsically representative (satisfiable), but rather represent only by virtue of their causal origin. They merely “track” the presence of substances and their qualities. Ideas nevertheless prompt perceivers to think of their causes. This is roughly because sensory ideas have a specific mental role, namely, to serve as marks for distinguishing substances and their respective qualities for purposes of action. The paper suggests that, for Locke, the challenge posed by the semantic veil of ideas is to explain this externally directed marking function within bounds of his anti‐innatism. But it concludes that his answers to the twin questions fit together reasonably well. (shrink)

Utilizing a broadly Levinasian framework, specifically the interplay among his ideas of possession, violence, and negation, Gabriel Keehn and Deron Boyles illustrate how the relatively recent sharp turn toward the hypercorporatized school and the concomitant transition of the student from simple customer to a type of hybrid consumer/consumable has rendered it more difficult for students to see themselves as engaged in any type of serious ethical relationship with those around them. To be unable to see their peers as Others, (...) in other words, makes it easier for students to perpetrate a specific type of violence against them. Keehn and Boyles suggest that current popular policy responses to gun violence in schools are approaches that, at best, fail to address the root cause of gun violence in schools and, at worst, are themselves branches of that root: namely, a homogenizing corporatism that creates an ethical vacuum in the schoolhouse. (shrink)

nature of personality and the structure of personality are distinguished, and the thesis that mainstream personality theories in psychology debate structure but not nature is illustrated with definitions. Mainstream theories assume that person ality is an inner determinant of behavior, but according to views in psychiatry, phenomenology and radical behaviorism the nature of personality is transactional. The theory of reinforcement schedules proposes general mechanisms of transac tions, and phenomenology gives particular transactions meaning. Interactionism, which locates personality in the person and (...) the situation, contributes measurement to transactionalism but its paradigmatic status is ambiguous because it implies an internal storage system for behavior. (shrink)