This article is an introduction to and advertisement of Erwin Schrödinger’s little-known real-valued wave equation, the first published time dependent Schrödinger equation. I argue that this equation is not merely a historical curiosity. Not only does it show that quantum mechanics need not be viewed as essentially complex-valued, but the real formalism also provides a deep insight into the puzzling nature of time reversal in a quantum world. It is hoped that this observation will stimulate the discovery of other areas (...) where ‘keeping it real’ will prove pedagogically or foundationally useful. (shrink)

Two females, Nadine and Fatu, are the sole surviving Northern White Rhinos (NWR). The subspecies is functionally extinct. Hope for NWR now lies in emerging reproductive and genetic technologies, which could potentially produce NWR from induced pluripotent stem cells. What is the rationale for this project? This question raises almost every philosophical issue facing conservation science today. I argue that NWR recovery is hard to justify via many traditional paths (e.g., historical fidelity, ecosystem health, biodiversity), but if we shift focus (...) to white rhinos in general or even mammals then clear benefits emerge. (shrink)

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom dominating the social sciences and philosophy regarding temporal discounting, the practice of discounting the value of future utility when making decisions. Although there are sharp disagreements about temporal discounting, a kind of standard model has arisen, one that begins with a normative standard about how we should make intertemporal comparisons of utility. This standard demands that in so far as one is rational one discounts utilities at future times with an exponential discount function. Tracing (...) the justification for this standard through economics, philosophy and psychology, I’ll make what I believe is the best case one can for it, showing how a non-arbitrariness assumption and a dominance argument together imply that discounting ought to be exponential. Ultimately, however, I don’t find the case compelling. Non-exponential temporal discounting is often rational. If this is correct, Instead of trying to ‘fix’ non-exponential discounting because it is irrational and associated with negative life outcomes, we might instead focus attention on why the conditions obtain that make such discounting rational. (shrink)

No shield can protect scientific realism from dealing with the quantum measurement problem. One may be able to erect barriers around the observable or classical, preserving a realism about tables, chairs and the like, but there is no safety zone within the quantum realm, the domain of our best physical theory. The upshot is not necessarily that scientific realism is in trouble. That conclusion demands further arguments. The lesson instead may be that scientific realists ought to stake their case on (...) particular interpretations of quantum theory. In any case, the realist can’t ignore the interpretational issues plaguing quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Organ transplantation from living related donors in Bangladesh first began in October 1982, and became commonplace in 1988. Cornea transplantation from posthumous donors began in 1984 and living related liver and bone marrow donor transplantation began in 2010 and 2014 respectively. The Human Organ Transplantation Act officially came into effect in Bangladesh on 13th April 1999, allowing organ donation from both brain-dead and related living donors for transplantation. Before the legislation, religious leaders issued fatwa, or religious rulings, in favor of (...) organ transplantation. The Act was amended by the Parliament on 8th January, 2018 with the changes coming into effect shortly afterwards on 28th January. However, aside from a few posthumous corneal donations, transplantation of vital organs, such as the kidney, liver, heart, pancreas, and other body parts or organs from deceased donors, has remained absent in Bangladesh. The major question addressed in this article is why the transplantation of vital organs from deceased donors is absent in Bangladesh. In addition to the collection of secondary documents, interviews were conducted with senior transplant physicians, patients and their relatives, and the public, to learn about posthumous organ donation for transplantation. Interviews were also conducted with a medical student and two grief counselors to understand the process of counseling the families and obtaining consent to obtain posthumous cornea donations from brain-dead patients. An interview was conducted with a professional anatomist to understand the processes behind body donation for the purposes of medical study and research. Their narrative reveals that transplant physicians may be reticent to declare brain death as the stipulations of the 1999 act were unclear and vague. This study finds that Bangladeshis have strong family ties and experience anxiety around permitting separating body parts of dead relatives for organ donation for transplantation, or donating the dead body for medical study and research purposes. Posthumous organ donation for transplantation is commonly viewed as a wrong deed from a religious point of view. Religious scholars who have been consulted by the government have approved posthumous organ donation for transplantation on the grounds of necessity to save lives even though violating the human body is generally forbidden in Islam. An assessment of the dynamics of biomedicine, religion and culture leads to the conclusion that barriers to posthumous organ donation for transplantation that are perceived to be religious may actually stem from cultural attitudes. The interplay of faith, belief, religion, social norms, rituals and wider cultural attitudes with biomedicine and posthumous organ donation and transplantation is very complex. Although overcoming the barriers to organ donation for transplantation is challenging, initiation of transplantation of vital organs from deceased donors is necessary within Bangladesh. This will ensure improved healthcare outcomes, prevent poor people from being coerced into selling their organs to rich recipients, and protect the solidarity and progeny of Bangladeshi families. (shrink)

Intro -- Introduction -- Chapter 1: "The best-laid plans of mice and men ..." -- Chapter 2: "Why won't you do what we think is best for you?" -- Chapter 3: How can I stop screwing up? -- Chapter 4: "Ouch!" -- Why did that backfire? -- Chapter 5: Scientific progress -- that's a good thing, right? -- Chapter 6: Surely trying to protect people can't be bad? -- Chapter 7: Can bad intentions turn out for the good? -- Chapter (...) 8: The upside -- unlooked for benefits -- Chapter 9: So -- how can we do good better? -- References. (shrink)

Professor Shannon Vallor’s theoretical framework of technomoral virtue ethics identifies character traits that can be cultivated to foster a future worth wanting in an environment of emerging technologies. Such technologies and increased citizen participation in the new digital environment have reconfigured what is possible in policing and intelligence-gathering more quickly, perhaps, than sober and sensible policy reflection and formulation can keep pace with. Sensational and dramatic, seismic and devastating, the Snowden disclosures represent a particular expression of dissent against American intelligence (...) community exploitation of emerging technologies in undertaking mass surveillance on a global scale. Responses to Snowden’s actions, and perceptions of the value of the disclosures he made, are polarized. Polar opposites equate to vices in the Aristotlean view that posits virtue as the middle way. Here, the theoretical framework of technomoral virtue ethics is used for objective evaluation of Snowden’s asserted motivations and documented actions against the benchmark of good cyber-citizenship that the framework describes. The fact that Snowden’s account is strongly disputed by the U.S. Government does not in and of itself invalidate a theoretical evaluation. It is not the probative value of Snowden’s account that is being tested, but how the narrative presented measures up to an ethical framework. (shrink)

I show how the two great Humean ways of understanding laws of nature, projectivism and systems theory, have unwittingly reprised developments in metaethics over the past century. This demonstration helps us explain and understand trends in both literatures. It also allows work on laws to “leap- frog” over the birth of many new positions, the nomic counterparts of new theories in metaethics. However, like leap-frogging from agriculture to the internet age, it’s hardly clear that we’ve landed in a good place. (...) My reactionary advice is to return to Hume and work on the central insights that motivated Humeanism about modality in the first place. When updated with contemporary insights, there we will find an attractive naturalistic theory of laws, or so I’ll argue, and along the way we’ll see how projectivism and systems theory both get something right about this overall theory. (shrink)

How should one discount utility across time? The conventional wisdom in social science is that one should use an exponential discount function. Such a function is a representation of the axioms that provide a well-defined utility function plus a condition known as stationarity. Yet stationarity doesnt really have much intuitive normative pull on its own. Here I try to cast it in a normative glow by deriving stationarity from two explicitly normative premises, both suggested by the philosophical thesis of temporal (...) neutralism. Putting the argument in this form helps us better understand exponential discounting and challenges to it. (shrink)

Diaries and other materials in the Mass Observation Archive have been characterised as intersubjective and dialogic. They have been used to study top-down and bottom-up processes, including how ordinary people respond to sociological constructs and, more broadly, the footprint of social science in the 20th century. In this article, we use the Archive’s COVID-19 collections to study how attempts to govern the pandemic by mobilising ordinary people to see like an epidemiologist played out in the United Kingdom during 2020. People (...) were asked to think in terms of populations and groups; rates, trends, and distributions; the capacity of public services; and complex systems of causation. How did they respond? How did they use the statistics, charts, maps, concepts, identities, and roles they were given? We find evidence of engagement with science plural; confident and comfortable engagement with epidemiological terms and concepts; sceptical and reluctant engagement with epidemiological subject positions; use of both scientific and moral literacy to negotiate regulations and guidance; and use of scientific literacy to compare and judge government performance. Governing the pandemic through scientific literacy was partially successful, but in some unexpected ways. (shrink)

The Anthropocene, in which humankind has become a geological force, is a major scientific proposal; but it also means that the conceptions of the natural and social worlds on which sociology, political science, history, law, economics and philosophy rest are called into question. The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis captures some of the radical new thinking prompted by the arrival of the Anthropocene and opens up the social sciences and humanities to the profound meaning of the new geological epoch, (...) the 'Age of Humans'. Drawing on the expertise of world-recognised scholars and thought-provoking intellectuals, the book explores the challenges and difficult questions posed by the convergence of geological and human history to the foundational ideas of modern social science. If in the Anthropocene humans have become a force of nature, changing the functioning of the Earth system as volcanism and glacial cycles do, then it means the end of the idea of nature as no more than the inert backdrop to the drama of human affairs. It means the end of the 'social-only' understanding of human history and agency. These pillars of modernity are now destabilised. The scale and pace of the shifts occurring on Earth are beyond human experience and expose the anachronisms of 'Holocene thinking'. The book explores what kinds of narratives are emerging around the scientific idea of the new geological epoch, and what it means for the 'politics of unsustainability'. (shrink)

As we navigate through life, we model time as flowing, the present as special, and the past as “dead.” This model of time—manifest time—develops in childhood and later thoroughly infiltrates our language, thought, and behavior. It is part of what makes a human life recognizably human. Yet if physics is correct, this model of the world is deeply mistaken. This book is about this conflict between manifest and physical time. The first half dives into the physics and philosophy to establish (...) the conflict’s existence; but it also argues that the claim that physics “spatializes” time is overstated. Rather, even relativity theory makes time special in deep and significant ways. The second half turns to psychology, biology, and more, seeking to understand why creatures like us develop manifest time. The novel picture that results is that manifest time is a natural reaction to the many cognitive and evolutionary challenges that we face. For subjects embedded in our circumstances, it makes sense to develop—even if fundamentally wrong. (shrink)

The Infectious Diseases Act entered into force officially on 14 November 2018 in Bangladesh. The Act is designed to raise awareness of, prevent, control, and eradicate infectious or communicable diseases to address public health emergencies and reduce health risks. A novel coronavirus disease was first identified in Bangladesh on 8 March 2020, and the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare issued a gazette on 23 March, listing COVID-19 as an infectious disease and addressing COVID-19 as a public health emergency. The (...) gazette empowers the government to monitor the spread of infection. Despite there being an infrastructure of research ethics committees in almost all hospitals in Bangladesh, a lack of such committees in the clinical setting often forces healthcare professionals to allocate scarce healthcare resources to the task. These personnel are often either influenced by materialistic matters or guided by the emergency policies, without reaching a consensus on how to allocate scarce resources in times of need, especially in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ethical dilemmas often arise when a number of patients with COVID-19, especially in poor and middle-class areas, are denied care while elites are prioritized to receive such scarce resources. Resource allocation in healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh appears to be unethical and in direct conflict with the biomedical principles of non-maleficence and procedural justice. The findings of this study suggest that the Act needs substantive changes in the stipulation of policy directing hospitals in the provision of resource allocation framework. Furthermore, parliament should produce guidance outlining how to successfully implement the law with the aim of protecting public health in times of emergency, especially the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

This study investigated whether employee perceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) were associated with the presence of Corporate Psychopaths in corporations. The article states that, as psychopaths are 1% of the population, it is logical to assume that every large corporation has psychopaths working within it. To differentiate these people from the common perception of psychopaths as being criminals, they have been called “Corporate Psychopaths” in this research. The article presents quantitative empirical research into the influence of Corporate Psychopaths on (...) four perceptual measures of CSR and three further measures of organizational commitment to employees. The article explains who Corporate Psychopaths are and delineates the measures of CSR and organizational commitment to employees that were used. It then outlines the research conducted among 346 corporate employees in Australia in 2008. The reliability of the instrument used is commented on favorably in terms of its statistical reliability and its face and external validity. Results of the research are described showing the highly significant and negative influence of Corporate Psychopaths on all of the measures of CSR and of organizational commitment to employees used in the research. When Corporate Psychopaths are present in leadership positions within organizations, employees are less likely to agree with views that: the organization does business in a socially desirable manner; does business in an environmentally friendly manner and that the organization does business in a way that benefits the local community. Also, when Corporate Psychopaths are present in leadership positions within organizations, employees are significantly less likely to agree that the corporation does business in a way that shows commitment to employees, significantly less likely to feel that they receive due recognition for doing a good job, to feel that their work was appreciated and to feel that their efforts were properly rewarded. The article argues that academics and researchers in the area of CSR cannot ignore the influence of individual managers. This is particularly the case when those managers have dysfunctional personalities, or are actually psychopaths. The article further argues that the existence of Corporate Psychopaths should be of interest to those involved in corporate management and corporate governance because their presence influences the way corporations are run and how corporations affect society and the environment. (shrink)

The plain speaking of the new environmental movements places emphasis on an imminent ecological crisis, but the 'new' environmentalists appear to lack insight into what specific action is required, to what they stand in opposition and more generally the political and economic context within which they (as social movements) are operating. The fact is that political and economic elites around the world have long been taking 'environmental action', to protect not Nature but themselves, against environmentalists and environmental regulation. The papers (...) in this issue of Environmental Values set out a range of ethical arguments and concerns that bring corporate capitalism into question or oppose it, and reflect upon ethical responses to its ongoing infliction of harm on the innocent. They make it clear that conformity to the system that produced the crisis will not deliver the necessary revolutionary social ecological transformation. (shrink)

By developing an absurd counterfactual history, I show that many objections launched against Bohmian mechanics could also have been made against Newtonian mechanics. This paper introduces readers to Koopman–von Neumann dynamics, an operator-based Hilbert space representation of classical statistical mechanics. Lessons for quantum foundations are drawn by replaying the battles between advocates of standard quantum theory and Bohmian mechanics in a fictional classical history.

The journal Environmental Values is thirty years old. In this retrospective, as the retiring Editor-in-Chief, I provide a set of personal reflections on the changing landscape of scholarship in the field. This historical overview traces developments from the journal's origins in debates between philosophers, sociologists, and economists in the UK to the conflicts over policy on climate change, biodiversity/non-humans and sustainability. Along the way various negative influences are mentioned, relating to how the values of Nature are considered in policy, including (...) mainstream environmental economics, naïve environmental pragmatism, the strategic role of corporations, neoliberalism and eco-modernism/techno-optimism. At the same time core value debates around intrinsic value in Nature and instrumentalism remain relevant, along with how plural environmental values can be articulated and acted upon. Naturalness, human relations to non-humans, and Nature as other, remain central considerations. The broadening of issues covered by the journal (e.g. covering social psychology, sociology and political science), reflect the need to address both human behaviour and the structure of social and economic systems to confront ongoing social-ecological crises. (shrink)

This longitudinal case study reports on a charity in the UK which gained a new CEO who was reported by two middle managers who worked in the charity, to embody all or most of the ten characteristics within a measure of corporate psychopathy. The leadership of this CEO with a high corporate psychopathy score was reported to be so poor that the organisation was described as being one without leadership and as a lost organisation with no direction. This paper outlines (...) the resultant characteristics of the ensuing aimlessness and lack of drive of the organisation involved. Comparisons are made to a previous CEO in the same organisation, who was reportedly an authentic, effective and transformational leader. Outcomes under the CEO with a high corporate psychopathy score were related to bullying, staff withdrawal and turnover as effective employees stayed away from and/or left the organisation. Outcomes also included a marked organisational decline in terms of revenue, employee commitment, creativity and organisational innovativeness. The paper makes a contribution to both leadership and to corporate psychopathy research as it appears to be the first reported study of a CEO with a high corporate psychopathy score. (shrink)

Let me begin by sincerely thanking the commentators for taking the time to share their insightful reactions to the target article [Callender 2022a]. I am very fortunate to have so many talented, di...

This book discusses Asian medicine, which puts enormous emphasis on prevention and preservation of health, and examines how, in recent decades, medical schools in Asia have been increasingly shifting toward a curative approach. It offers an ethnographic investigation of the scenarios in China and India and finds that modern students and graduates in these countries perceive Asian medicine to be as important as Western medicine. There is a growing tendency to integrate Asian medicine with Western medical thought in the academic (...) curriculum that has led to a gradual decline of Asian medical thought and practices. At the same time, there has been a massive rise in patent drugs, health products and cosmetics being sold under the brand names of Asian medicine or herbal medicine. Most of these drugs and health products do not follow the classical formulas found in the Asian medical texts. The book analyses these texts and concludes that contemporary Asian medicine rarely follows the classical texts, and in fact uses Asian medicine brands to sell Western health products and practices. With a particular focus on the formal and professional sector of Chinese herbal medicine and Indian ayurvedic medicine in urban areas, this book appeals to a broad readership, including undergraduate students and academics as well as non-experts. Md. Nazrul Islam is an Associate Professor in the General Education Office, United International College, Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist University. He was a Visiting Associate Professor in the School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia (2015-16) during which time he completed this book manuscript. (shrink)

Is the quantum state part of the furniture of the world? Einstein found such a position indigestible, but here I present a different understanding of the wavefunction that is easy to stomach. First, I develop the idea that the wavefunction is nomological in nature, showing how the quantum It or Bit debate gets subsumed by the corresponding It or Bit debate about laws of nature. Second, I motivate the nomological view by casting quantum mechanics in a “classical” formalism (Hamilton–Jacobi theory) (...) and classical mechanics in a “quantum” formalism (Koopman–von Neumann theory) and then comparing and contrasting classical and quantum wave functions. I argue that Humeans about laws can treat classical and quantum wave functions on a par and that doing so yields many benefits. (shrink)

The government of Bangladesh approved the human organ transplantation law in 1999 and updated it in 2018. This legislation approved both living‐related donor and posthumous organ transplantation. The law only allows family members to legally donate organs to their relatives. The main focus of this study was to explore how Bangladeshis make donation decisions on familial organs for transplantation. My ethnographic fieldwork with forty participants (physicians and nurses, a healthcare administrator, organ donors, recipients, and their relatives) disclosed that the organ (...) donation decision was family‐based. An assessment of the relationship between religion, culture, and biomedicine leads to the conclusion that deciding on donating organs to relatives is primarily family‐based and is perceived to be steeped in Islamic ethical principles and religious cultural tradition. The family‐based consent and motivation for donor‐recipient pair organ transplantation strengthen an altruistic environment for the family and act as the moral and legal authority that ensures ethical healthcare outcomes for Bangladeshis. (shrink)

This paper argues that the conditions of the Anthropocene render the four ontologies described by Philippe Descola obsolete, and begins the search for a fifth ontology that speaks to the meaning of...

This study examines the role of the principle of Sikh liberalism in promoting communal harmony in today’s world. Communal harmony has been under threat in almost all countries for decades, and bigotry, distrust, and animosity prevail among the followers of diverse faithbased communities. Individuals need to be whole-hearted, liberal in approach, and tolerant toward the followers of other communities to reduce such inconsistencies in our society. The paper explores that the ideology of Sikh liberalism can be a role model for (...) establishing peace in today’s world of communal violence. This work is a sincere effort to deal with several issues, e.g., humanism, tolerance, fraternity, equality, freedom, secularism, religious pluralism, and accessibility to and honor for contrasting opinions, based on the principle of Sikh liberalism, which are the root of Sikh liberalism. The qualitative research evaluates the all-embracing aspects of Sikhism, where the liberal notion of Guru Granth Sahib and the liberal attitudes of the Sikh Gurus, especially Guru Nanak (1469-1539), the founder of Sikhism, have mainly been highlighted. It discovers the role of Sikhism in promoting communal harmony by analyzing the idea of Sikh liberalism. Thus, the study aims to make the states, governments, and the general people aware of their responsibilities and duties towards promoting communal harmony through comprehending the Sikh approaches to liberalism. Philosophy and Progress, Vol#69-70; No#1-2; Jan-Dec 2021 P 189-209. (shrink)

This short theoretical paper elucidates a plausible theory about the Global Financial Crisis and the role of senior financial corporate directors in that crisis. The paper presents a theory of the Global Financial Crisis which argues that psychopaths working in corporations and in financial corporations, in particular, have had a major part in causing the crisis. This paper is thus a very short theoretical paper but is one that may be very important to the future of capitalism because it discusses (...) significant ways in which Corporate Psychopaths may have acted recently, to the detriment of many. Further research into this theory is called for. (shrink)

Environmental commodification, trading and offsetting are business as usual approaches to environmental policy. There is also consensus across political divides about the need for economic growth. Many environmental NGOs have become apologists for corporate self-regulation, market mechanisms, carbon pricing/trading and biodiversity offsetting/banking, while themselves commercialising species 'protection' as eco-tourism. In this issue of Environmental Values the state and direction of the environmental movement are at the fore. D'Amato et al. contrast pragmatism with the need for revolutionary change and consider which (...) will achieve social ecological transformation. Parry raises the issue of how animal activists should operate within an idealised deliberative democracy and what they could then legitimately justify doing to further their cause. Quist and Rinne are concerned with the challenges that disenfranchised groups face in building shared agendas and expressing themselves in their struggles to protect the environment and their ways of life. How natural resource extraction issues are framed by the media is the concern of Davies et al. Issues of power, inclusion and representation in the environmental movement are also raised in the paper by Fenney, which addresses the challenges specifically faced by disabled people. Societal change is an inherently value laden and political issue. Environmental policy is no more a win-win than any other policy; this journal issue shows how different polices change winners and losers. (shrink)

The no-miracles argument and the pessimistic induction are arguably the main considerations for and against scientific realism. Recently these arguments have been accused of embodying a familiar, seductive fallacy. In each case, we are tricked by a base rate fallacy, one much-discussed in the psychological literature. In this paper we consider this accusation and use it as an explanation for why the two most prominent `wholesale' arguments in the literature seem irresolvable. Framed probabilistically, we can see very clearly why realists (...) and anti-realists have been talking past one another. We then formulate a dilemma for advocates of either argument, answer potential objections to our criticism, discuss what remains (if anything) of these two major arguments, and then speculate about a future philosophy of science freed from these two arguments. In so doing, we connect the point about base rates to the wholesale/retail distinction; we believe it hints at an answer of how to distinguish profitable from unprofitable realism debates. In short, we offer a probabilistic analysis of the feeling of ennui afflicting contemporary philosophy of science. (shrink)

With an eye on developing a quantum theory of gravity, many physicists have recently searched for quantum challenges to the equivalence principle of general relativity. However, as historians and philosophers of science are well aware, the principle of equivalence is not so clear. When clarified, we think quantum tests of the equivalence principle won’t yield much. The problem is that the clash/not-clash is either already evident or guaranteed not to exist. Nonetheless, this work does help teach us what it means (...) for a theory to be geometric. (shrink)

This paper discusses the mistake of understanding the laws and concepts of thermodynamics too literally in the foundations of statistical mechanics. Arguing that this error is still made in subtle ways, the article explores its occurrence in three examples: the Second Law, the concept of equilibrium and the definition of phase transitions.

This book will be of great interest to students and researchers alike across the social sciences and particularly in philosophy, economics and sociology.

We propose that scientific representation is a special case of a more general notion of representation, and that the relatively well worked-out and plausible theories of the latter are directly applicable to thc scientific special case. Construing scientific representation in this way makes the so-called “problem of scientific representation” look much less interesting than it has seerned to many, and suggests that some of the (hotly contested) debates in the literature are concerned with non-issues.

There has always been a sub-group of established economists trying to convey an environmental critique of the mainstream. This paper traces their thinking into the late 20th century via the development of associations and journals in the USA and Europe. There is clearly a divergence between the conformity to neo-classical economics favoured by resource and environmental economists and the acceptance of more radical critiques apparent in ecological economics. Thus, the progressive elements of ecological economics are increasingly incompatible with those practising (...) neo-classical environmental economics who try to reduce all concepts to fit within the confines of their models. A group of people can be identified who teach that ecological economics is nothing more than a name for the link between mainstream economics and ecology. A new movement and paradigm are unnecessary for such ends. This viewpoint is argued to be inconsistent with the roots and ideas of the ecological economics movement. Ecological economics is seen here to be synthesising various types of economics and moving back to explicit inclusion of ethical issues in the mode of classical political economy. This inevitably means rediscovering neglected past works and exploring new ways of thinking about socio- economics and the environment. (shrink)

Moving sustainability towards flourishing for all implies a care for all and for the future. However, in this commentary I note that many corporate and political leaders do not care for others or the future because, embodying egotistical, ruthless, remorseless, and dishonest (psychopathic) characteristics, their concern is only for themselves. This commentary argues that toxic leadership and governance, in the form of corporate psychopathy and corporate psychopaths, are important barriers to achieving sustainability. Notably, and of relevance to this argument, the (...) embodiment of psychopathic traits can give people the ability to brazenly push themselves to the top, unimpeded by emotional distractions and thereby attain leadership. However, due to their deep indifference to corporate social responsibility and a readiness to falsify environmental impact reports, engage in faking corporate social responsibility and illegally dump toxic waste materials; the influence of such psychopathic leadership may be detrimental to sustainability and to flourishing for all. Leaders high in psychopathy will ignore or dismiss scientific evidence of unsustainable practices because they do not care about the future or about dismissing scientific evidence of detriments to the prospects for humanity. Accordingly toxic leadership and governance are arguably the critical factors in achieving a flourishing sustainability. The future of all life thus depends on who we choose as our leaders. (shrink)

In 1999, the Bangladesh government introduced the Human Organ Transplantation Act allowing organ transplants from both brain-dead and living-related donors. This Act approved organ donation within family networks, which included immediate family members such as parents, adult children, siblings, uncles, aunts, and spouses. Subsequently, in January 2018, the government amended the 1999 Act to include certain distant relatives, such as grandparents, grandchildren, and first cousins, in the donor lists, addressing the scarcity of donors. Nobody, without these relatives, is legally permitted (...) to donate organs for transplantation in Bangladesh. The focus of this study was to investigate who should donate organs for transplantation in Bangladesh. The ethnographic fieldwork revealed that potential donors are not always available to immediate family members, and even when they are, they might be medically unsuitable for transplants. These considerations influenced the government in the revision of the Act. Secondly, the findings of the study suggest maintaining the current family-based regulations for living organ donation in Bangladesh. Furthermore, the study highlighted a potential consequence: amending the regulation to permit donations to unrelated recipients could significantly amplify the issue of organ selling and buying. While Islam advises Muslims to be compassionate towards all humankind, it also encourages Muslims to prioritize saving the lives of family members. This religious belief limits Muslims from donating organs to family members. (shrink)

This article reports on empirical research that establishes strong, positive, and significant correlations between the ethical issues of bullying and unfair supervision in the workplace and the presence of Corporate Psychopaths. The main measure for bullying is identified as being the witnessing of the unfavorable treatment of others at work. Unfair supervision was measured by perceptions that an employee's supervisor was unfair and showed little interest in the feelings of subordinates. This article discusses the theoretical links between psychopathy and bullying (...) and notes that little empirical evidence confirms the connection in management research. The sample of 346 Australian senior white collar workers used in the research is described as is the measure of behavior for identifying psychopaths. The findings are then presented and discussed showing that when Corporate Psychopaths are present in a work environment, the level of bullying is significantly greater than when they are not present. Further, that when Corporate Psychopaths are present, supervisors are strongly perceived as being unfair to employees and disinterested in their feelings. This article concludes that around 26% of bullying is accounted for by 1% of the employee population, those who are Corporate Psychopaths. (shrink)

Perhaps the most significant contemporary theory of lawhood is the Best System (/MRL) view on which laws are true generalizations that best systematize knowledge. Our question in this paper will be how best to formulate a theory of this kind. We’ll argue that an acceptable MRL should (i) avoid inter-system comparisons of simplicity, strength, and balance, (ii) make lawhood epistemically accessible, and (iii) allow for laws in the special sciences. Attention to these problems will bring into focus a useful menu (...) of novel MRL theories, some of which solve problems the original MRL theory could not. Hence we conceive of the paper as moving toward a better Best System theory of laws. (shrink)

We propose that scientific representation is a special case of a more general notion of representation, and that the relatively well worked-out and plausible theories of the latter are directly applicable to the scientific special case.