Textile is one of the largest export and source of foreign exchange in Pakistan. For the last two decades, Textile sector is serving as the backbone for Pakistan economy. Several foreign retailers including Target, Jessie Penny, Wal-Mart, and Kohl’s are outsourcing textile and garments from Pakistan. Along with the quality, these retailers are highly concerned with the ethical and social issues of their suppliers, including child labor, forced labor, compensation, working hours and environment health, and safety. My current study is (...) an applied research, based on the problem, regarding the working hours and its proper management in textile factories, mismanagement of which lead to serious issues during social and ethical standard audits. Repetition of which may consequent in termination of business with suppliers and factories. The research hypothesis is that working off the clock will lead to overtime premium not paid and double book record keeping. As far as ethical and social compliance is concerned both overtime premiums not paid and double book records are critical issues during SC audit. A sample of 40 suppliers of Pakistan was randomly selected working with foreign buyers. Secondary data were used to verify the findings based on Audits finding conducted by different third party during a period of 2 years, i.e. Feb., 2010 to Jan., 2012. The results and research findings reflect that during the last 2 years out of 40 factories audit reports 25 factories were found having working off the clock that also lead to overtime premium not paid. However, double book records were not witnessed in all 40 factories SC audit reports as parallel records were not maintained by any factories. The above findings will help the suppliers, factories, and buyers to develop a proactive approach and proper production planning to avoid critical issues and smooth business activities. (shrink)

This article examines eight “gaps” in order to clarify why the quantitative genetics methods of partitioning variation of a trait into heritability and other components has very limited power to show anything clear and useful about genetic and environmental influences, especially for human behaviors and other traits. The first two gaps should be kept open; the others should be bridged or the difficulty of doing so should be acknowledged: 1. Key terms have multiple meanings that are distinct; 2. Statistical patterns (...) are distinct from measurable underlying factors; 3. Translation from statistical analyses to hypotheses about measurable factors is difficult; 4. Predictions based on extrapolations from existing patterns of variation may not match outcomes; 5. The partitioning of variation in human studies does not reliably estimate the intended quantities; 6. Translation from statistical analyses to hypotheses about the measurable factors is even more difficult in light of the possible heterogeneity of underlying genetic or environmental factors; 7. Many steps lie between the analysis of observed traits and interventions based on well-founded claims about the causal influence of genetic or environmental factors; 8. Explanation of variation within groups does not translate to explanation of differences among groups. At the start, I engage readers’ attention with three puzzles that have not been resolved by past debates. The puzzles concern generational increases in IQ test scores, the possibility of underlying heterogeneity, and the translation of methods from selective breeding into human genetics. After discussing the gaps, I present each puzzle in a new light and point to several new puzzles that invite attention from analysts of variation in quantitative genetics and in social science more generally. The article’s critical perspectives on agricultural, laboratory, and human heritability studies are intended to elicit further contributions from readers across the fields of history, philosophy, sociology, and politics of biology and in the sciences. (shrink)

Eco-labels emphasize information disclosure as a tool to induce environmentally friendly behaviors by both firms and consumers. The goal of eco-labels is to reduce information asymmetry between producers and consumers over the environmental attributes of a product or service. However, by focusing on this information asymmetry, rather than on how the label meets consumer needs, eco-labels may send irrelevant, confusing, or even detrimental messages to consumers. In this article, the authors investigate how the environmental signal of eco-labels interacts with product (...) characteristics such as brand, quality, and price. In a discrete choice experiment, the authors examine consumer response to two similar eco-labels for wine, one associated with a quality reduction and the other not. The results show that respondents preferred both eco-labeled wines over otherwise identical conventional counterparts when the price was lower and the wine was from a lower quality region. However, they preferred conventional, more expensive wine from a high-quality region. This preference indicates that respondents not only obtain some warm glow value from eco-labeled wine but also possibly interpret eco-labeling as a signal of lower quality. This relationship held across both types of eco-labels, meaning that consumers did not understand the difference between them. This research contributes to the literature on information disclosure policies by highlighting important elements for effective eco-labels. These elements include consumer awareness and understanding of the eco-label, and consumer willingness to pay for an eco-labeled product. The results emphasize the need to create eco-labels that communicate clearly both the environmental attributes and the private benefits associated with them. (shrink)

A growing literature documents the existence of individuals who make a living by participating in phase I clinical trials for money. Several scholars have noted that the concerns about risks, consent, and exploitation raised by this phenomenon apply to many (other) jobs, too, and therefore proposed improving subject protections by regulating phase I trial participation as work. This article contributes to the debate over this proposal by exploring a largely neglected worry. Unlike most (other) workers, subjects are not paid (...) to produce or achieve anything but to have things done to them. I argue that this passivity is problematic for reasons of distributive justice. Specifically, it fails to enable subjects to realize what Gheaus and Herzog call “the goods of work”—a failure not offset by adequate opportunities to realize these goods outside of the research context. I also consider whether granting subjects worker-type protections would accommodate this concern. (shrink)

Since the transparency approach to introspection need not posit a dedicated mechanism specialized for detecting one’s own mental states, its economy is often viewed as a major advantage by both proponents and opponents. But sometimes economy comes at the cost of relying on controversial views of the natures of mental states. Perceptual experience is a case in point. For example, Alex Byrne’s account relies on the view that experience constitutively involves belief, and Matthew Boyle’s account relies on the view that (...) experience constitutively involves a form of implicit consciousness of experience. In this paper, I develop a transparency account of our access to our experiences that retains the benefit of economy while avoiding the cost of relying on controversial views of the nature of experience. I start by discussing Byrne’s and Boyle’s accounts. I focus on the problems that lead them to hold the controversial views they do, and raise some challenges to their solutions. I then develop my own account. I argue that when you attend to an object, your experience gives you justification to believe that you see the object (under some descriptions). I close by highlighting some advantages of my account. I argue that it (1) can solve the problems facing Byrne and Boyle without relying on controversial views of the nature of experience; (2) respects the idea that there is something special about our access to our minds; and (3) can be generalized to other cases of introspection. (shrink)

In this study, we examine the equity premium of seventeen nonfinancial sectors covering sample 306 firms using monthly data from January 2002 to December 2018. Two-stage least square method is applied to estimate the macro-based multifactor model. It is found that the market premium and the interest rate factors are significantly affecting the industry equity premium of all the nonfinancial sectors. However, there exists a positive effect of other macroeconomic variables such as money supply, foreign direct investment, (...) and industrial production which is different for the different sectors based on its nature of product and services they offered. The industries based on their product development which are linked to particular macroeconomic variables have more effect than others such as increase in money supply which cannot increase the sale of pharmaceutical products until needed. Similarly, an interesting insight reveals that industries producing seasonal goods, e.g., food producing, are not very much affected by macroeconomic variables but the change in seasons and similar results also revealed for tobacco industry. (shrink)

Insufficient attention has been paid to the ethics of distributing costs of insurance risk. Seven approaches are articulated: the egalitarian model, the needs/ability model, the loss history model, the statistical model, the causality model, the moral fault model (avoidability interpretation and worldview interpretation), and eclectic models. The ethical dimensions of each model are explored. Although some reasons are given for preferring the eclectic model, the main purpose of the paper is to provide an ethical framework for further discussion of (...) an oft-neglected issue. (shrink)

With the rise of live streaming commerce, the relationship between consumers and content creators on the short-video platforms has become closer, forming a peculiar culture and language in each consumer community, which promotes the short-video platforms to become a natural breeding ground for forming consumer communities. While such communities give birth to its own language and culture from the interaction between content creators and consumers, this kind of co-creation can not only enhance the consumers’ trust to improve commodity premium (...) space, but also strengthen the ties within the community and spread the information outside the communities, and consequently, expand community scale. Based on the view of the value co-creation from the language and culture among content creators and consumers in the communities, this study starts from the point of product type, employs consumers’ Willingness to pay premium as a proxy variable of brand advocacy in the co-creation of cultural and language values in consumer communities, and conducts three single-factor experiments between two groups. By analyzing the experimental results, this study identified the influence under the potential relationship mechanism, social comparison, and found another variable that can moderate the relationship, consumer trust, portrays the relationship between the product types of the live streaming commerce and the consumers’ WoPP, and explores the mediating effect of social comparison and the moderate effect of consumer trust effect. This paper also analyzes and discusses the WoPP caused by the co-creation of cultural and language values co-created by creators and consumer communities. (shrink)

Background: The division of non-paid labor in heterosexual parents in the West is usually still gender-based, with mothers taking on the majority of direct caregiving responsibilities. However, in same-sex couples, gender cannot be the deciding factor. Inspired by Feinberg’s ecological model of co-parenting, this study investigated whether infant temperament, parent factors (biological relatedness to child, psychological adjustment, parenting stress, and work status), and partner relationship quality explained how first-time gay, lesbian, and heterosexual parents divided labor (childcare and family decision-making) (...) when their infants were four months and 12 months old. We also tested whether family type acted as a moderator. Method: Participants were drawn from [MASKED FOR REVIEW]. Only those who provided information about their biological relatedness (yes or no) to their child (N = 263 parents) were included. When infants were four months (T1), parents completed a password-protected online questionnaire exploring their demographic characteristics including work status and standardized online-questionnaires on task division (childcare and family decision-making), infant temperament, parental anxiety, parental depression, parental stress, and partner relationship satisfaction. When infants were 12-months-old (T2), parents provided information about task division and their biological relatedness to their children. Results: Linear mixed models showed that no factor explained the division of family decision making at T1 and T2. For relative time spent on childcare tasks at T1, biological relatedness mattered for lesbian mothers only: biologically related mothers appeared to spend more time on childcare tasks than did non-related mothers. Results showed that, regardless of family type, parents who were not working or were working part-time at T1 performed more childcare tasks at T1. This was still true at T2. The other factors did not significantly contribute to relative time spent on childcare tasks at T2. Conclusion: We had the opportunity to analyze the division of non-paid tasks in families where parenting was necessarily planned and in which gender could not affect that division. Although Feinberg’s model of co-parenting suggests that various factors are related to task division, we found that paid work outside the home was most important during the first year of parenthood in determining caregiving roles. (shrink)

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sanctioned investor-paid rating agency Egan-Jones for falsely stating that it did not know its clients’ investment positions. The SEC’s action against Egan-Jones raises the broad question whether knowledge of clients’ investment positions creates a conflict of interest for investor-paid ratings. In an experimental setting, we find that investor-paid rating agencies are likely to assign credit ratings that are biased in favor of their clients’ positions, and that this effect is attenuated when (...) the rated company has a sophisticated investor base that is expected to scrutinize ratings. The effect is not conditional on the risk profile of the rated companies. Taken together, our findings suggest that a conflict of interest stemming from investors’ preferences is likely to bias ratings under investor-pays business models, but scrutiny by the company’s investor base can counteract this bias. (shrink)

Sustainable luxury is a strategic issue for managers and for society, yet it remains poorly understood. This research seeks to clarify how corporate social responsibility actions directly and indirectly affect consumers’ willingness to pay a premium price for luxury brand products, as well as how a long-term orientation might moderate these relationships. A scenario study presents fictional CSR actions of two brands, representing different luxury products, to 1,049 respondents from two countries. The results of a structural equation modeling approach (...) show that the luxury brands’ CSR actions negatively affect customer WTPP overall and for each brand. The luxury brands’ functional and symbolic value dimensions positively mediate the effects of CSR actions on WTPP, whereas social value does not. The effects of CSR actions and brand symbolic value on WTTP do not differ between countries. The effect of functional value on WTPP differs across countries, such that it is stronger for high-LTO than low-LTO cultures. Inversely, the effect of social on customer WTPP is stronger for low-LTO than high-LTO cultures. These findings have theoretical and practical implications for luxury brand managers. (shrink)

This paper explores new working time arrangements around a critique of the ‘commodification of time’ to illuminate the contradictions of such new flexibilities. Two features of these new arrangements are seen as relevant for evaluating the Marx/Engels analysis. Firstly, it roots the examination of time in commodification, although, as criticised in this paper, some authors have seen this as the generality of time rather than that within the exchange of labour power. Significantly — and central in all working time arrangements (...) — it is labour power that is sold, be it for a particular period of time, rather than the time itself. Hence, working time arrangements set boundaries against ‘free’ time or time in which labour power is not sold as a commodity, that ‘free’ time which was recognised in the traditional arrangements — fought over in early industrialism — which set premium payments against anti-social hours within ‘overtime’. New working time arrangements tend to blur the boundaries between ‘free’ and ‘working’ time, assuming an availability of labour power to capital. While much of the promotion of flexibility stresses the possibility of making adjustment to suit social and domestic requirements it is more usually the means for altering working time to meet the demands of capital. The much-vaunted case of Volkswagen has led to ‘working time accounts’ becoming the established temporal arrangement within the German car industry and increasingly becoming the norm for other European auto producers. The name given to these new working arrangements within the motor industry suggests that time has indeed become further commodified. For workers within these new time regimes, the hours owed to their employer is displayed along with their earnings — and deductions — on their wage slip. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper begins with the assumption that it is morally problematic when people in need are offered money in exchange for research participation if the amount offered is unfair. Such offers are called ‘coercive’, and the degree of coerciveness is determined by the offer's potential to cause exploitation and its irresistibility. Depending on what view we take on the possibility to compensate for the sacrifices made by research participants, a wish to avoid ‘coercive offers’ leads to policy recommendations concerning payment (...) for participation. For sacrifices considered compensable, we ought to offer either no payment or payment at a level deemed fair, while for sacrifices deemed incompensable, we always ought to offer no payment because as compensation appears and increases, so too does coercion. This article provides a model for thinking of the way in which degrees of exploitativeness, irresistibility, and coerciveness interact with the size of the reward for compensable and incompensable cases. T... (shrink)

There is debate about whether the post-Fordist or high-performance work organization can overcome the disadvantages women encounter in traditional gendered organizations. Some authors argue that substituting a performance logic for control by the clock offers opportunities for combining work and family life in a more natural way. Critics respond that these organizational reforms do not address the nonresponsibility of firms for caring duties at a more fundamental level. The authors address this debate through an analysis of overtime work, using (...) data from a survey of 1,114 employees in 30 Dutch organizations. The findings reveal that post-Fordist work is associated with more overtime hours than traditional forms of work and that far from challenging gendered organization, it reproduces and exacerbates the traditional male model of work. (shrink)

There is currently much debate in the economic literature about whether ethical investment involves a financial sacrifice or premium. One of the most common methods of testing this compares the financial performance of ethical investment funds with that of other funds not considered “socially responsible” or ethical. The majority of these research studies evaluate the performance of the ethical funds according to classic measures, whereby different financial markets, in different countries and for different periods of time serve as reference (...) for evaluation. The ultimate conclusion of all of these studies is that there are no significant differences between the performance results of one type of funds and the other. In Spain, ethical investment funds are still an incipient sector of investment. To date, the Spanish market has not been included in any type of analysis of these characteristics. Therefore the main objective of this article is to compare the financial performance of ethical investment funds to that of other funds in the Spanish retail market. We propose the aggregate type of analysis as the Spanish ethical investment funds have experienced a weaker development in comparison to those of other developed countries. In the first step we suggest the financial performance to be compared by style analysis since the asset distribution of the Spanish Social Return Investment (SRI) funds differs from the European trend. In particular, we use the multifactor regression model with style benchmarks. We found that their financial performance is in all cases superior or similar to that achieved by the rest of the funds. In the second step, to achieve a more robust and homogeneous comparison, we used the bootstrap method, comparing ethical and non-ethical fund subsamples by homogeneous groups. No significant differences between these two types of funds have been found. Thus, if we assume the positive o neutral effect of ethical investment on investor utility in the retail Spanish market the financial and social performance (FSP) of ethical funds will be, in aggregate, superior to the FSP achieved by conventional funds. In conclusion, the financial performance of ethical mutual funds in Spain is no sacrifice. (shrink)

Rising health insurance costs and the cost of living crisis are likely leading to an increase in unpaid health insurance bills in many countries. In Switzerland, a particularly drastic measure to sanction defaulting insurance payers is employed. Since 2012, Swiss cantons – who have to cover most of the bills of defaulting payers - are allowed by federal law to blacklist them and to restrict their access to medical care to emergencies.In our paper, we briefly describe blacklisting in the context (...) of the Swiss healthcare system before we examine the ethical issues involved in light of what is known about its social and health impacts. We found no evidence that blacklisting serves as an effective way of recovering unpaid health insurance contributions or of strengthening solidarity within the health insurance system. Furthermore, the ambiguous definitions of what constitutes an emergency treatment and the incompatibility of the denial of medical care with the obligation to provide professional assistance complicate the implementation of blacklists and expose care providers to enormous pressure.Therefore, we conclude that blacklists and the (partial) denial of medical care not only pose profound ethical problems but are also unsuitable for fulfilling the purpose for which they were introduced. (shrink)

Heritage values are basic in conservation, nevertheless there is not a methodology to analyze their variation over time and how it has affected the conservation of heritage assets. Therefore, a methodology that allows us to determine their variation in written descriptions about a specific heritage site was needed. In this article we have addressed the concept of heritage values and stressed their importance and their variability over time, but also analyzed different methods from the field of linguistics that would better (...) adapt to determine heritage values variation and their application in the heritage field. (shrink)

Building on group discussions and interviews with life science researchers in Austria, this paper analyses the narratives that researchers use in describing what they feel responsible for, with a particular focus on how they perceive the societal responsibilities of their research. Our analysis shows that the core narratives used by the life scientists participating in this study continue to be informed by the linear model of innovation. This makes it challenging for more complex innovation models [such as responsible research and (...) innovation ] to gain ground in how researchers make sense of and conduct their research. Furthermore, the paper shows that the life scientists were not easily able to imagine specific practices that would address broader societal concerns and thus found it hard to integrate the latter into their core responsibilities. Linked to this, researchers saw institutional reward structures as strongly focused on scientific excellence. Thus, they saw reward structures as competing with—rather than incentivising—broader notions of societal responsibility. This narrative framing of societal responsibilities is indicative of a structural marginalisation of responsibility practices and explains the claim, made by many researchers in our sample, that they cannot afford to spend time on such practices. The paper thus concludes that the core ideas of RRI stand in tension with predominant narrative and institutional infrastructures that researchers draw on to attribute meaning to their research practices. This suggests that scientific institutions still have a core role to play in providing new and context-specific narratives as well as new forms of valuing responsibility practices. (shrink)

Elite U.S.-based global law firms concentrate in the costliest districts of superstar cities, especially two neighborhoods in Manhattan. This pattern has persisted despite both the dispersal of Biglaw clients across less-dense, lower-cost U.S. geographies and the development of telework capacity. It suggests a puzzle: law is among the occupations most conducive to remote work, yet Biglaw prior to the coronavirus pandemic required in-person work in the priciest places—meaning it paid a premium on both of its biggest expenses, wages (...) and real estate. How might this equilibrium be explained, and what might lead it to change? This Article contends that Biglaw clustering reflects a management preference for the exploitation of proven strategies over the exploration of novel and uncertain ones—but that the pandemic telework experience is eroding this dichotomy. This analysis has direct implications for private international law practice, where large-scale transactions and disputes are handled by Biglaw firms and involve significant international travel. This Article contributes to a growing literature on telework’s impacts on cities, labor markets, and industries, and is the first to extend that focus to Biglaw and PIL. A post-pandemic Biglaw embrace of dispersal via telework would destabilize standard accounts of collaboration in agglomeration economies. While the Article expresses skepticism about that outcome, it identifies a mechanism by which it might plausibly come about. Crucially, this mechanism—the replacement of an exploit vs. explore choice with two different exploit options—posits as the key driver not technology but management learning and innovation that quickened during the pandemic. (shrink)

The famous dispute between Protagoras and Euathlus concerning Protagoras’s tuition fee reportedly owed to him by Euathlus is solved on the basis of practical argumentation concerning actions. The dispute is widely viewed as a kind of a logical paradox, and I show that such treating arises due to the double confusion in the dispute narrative. The linguistic expressions used to refer to Protagoras’s, Euathlus’s and the jurors’ actions are confused with these actions themselves. The other confusion is the collision between (...) the pairs of incompatible actions ambiguously expressed by two different pairs of sentences, one of which is a propositionally consistent pair whereas the other is an inconsistent one. The actional paradox solution aims to clear up these confusions by means of two core borderlines, propositional and expressive, drawn between the actions and the propositions. The propositional distinction says that actions are empirical facts and they lack truth values unlike propositions, which are mental entities and are often employed for referring to the actions. This distinction helps to avoid the confusion between the empirical incompatibility of actions and the truth-functional inconsistency of propositions. The expressive distinction claims that although the same linguistic sentences can be used to refer both to actions and propositions, two empirically incompatible actions can be expressed both by a pair of inconsistent propositions as well as by a pair of consistent ones. Therefore, the action of Protagoras’s being paid may be linguistically symbolized in four different ways: Protagoras gets paid due to the verdict, Protagoras gets paid due to the contract that amount to Protagoras does not get paid by the contract and Protagoras does not get paid by the verdict respectively, and likewise for Euathlus’s actions. The two distinctions are used for classifying the two groups of paradox solutions, legal and logical, proposed so far depending on which of the two confusions they purport to escape from. The actional reconstruction of the paradox suggests that there is only one single agent in the dispute, Protagoras, while the other named Euathlus is a ‘phantom,’ which most probably was invented by Protagoras himself for the sake of creating this challenging sophism. (shrink)

Labor market and real-life studies were not designed to discriminate between evolutionary and taste-based and stereotype explanations for the beauty premium, have too many confounding effects, and lack crucial information. Smaller-stake and experimental studies provide more compelling evidence in favor of mating motives and suggest the direction of future research for the economists' field studies.

We conduct an online survey experiment to determine the influence of multifunctionality recognition in agriculture on the price premiums of environmental-friendly agricultural products. We use the case of fish-friendly rice produced in Shiga prefecture, Japan, which contributes to the conservation of the water and ecosystem in rural areas around Lake Biwa by setting up fish ways and reducing the use of herbicides. We assume two conditions for consumers to pay premiums on environmental-friendly agricultural products. The first is that consumers recognize (...) multifunctionality in agriculture. The second condition is that consumers have a correct understanding of environment-friendly agricultural products. We thus examine the effects of respondents’ attributes on their responses to two types of visual stimuli: one associated with the multifunctionality of agriculture and information about environment-friendly agricultural products. In the analysis of the respondents; willingness to pay, the price premium of the group with both the stimulus and information is significantly higher than the price premium of the control group with no interventions. However, the price premium of the group with only the stimulus is not statistically different for the control group. The policy implication of this research is that consumers are more likely to support agri-environmental policies if they recognize both the multifunctionality of agriculture and the properties of environmental-friendly agricultural products. The two types of stimuli have complimentary effects on increasing price premiums. Promoting the recognition of multifunctionality is especially important for those who do not usually access information on agriculture. (shrink)

Green food has exceptional impacts in addressing food safety and environmental challenges. However, consumers' perception of green food is not substantial, which results in a decline in consumption intention. Since advertising appeals can play a bridging role in resolving information asymmetry. This study is based on self-construal theory, chooses green agricultural products images and text as experimental stimuli, and analyzes the interaction and influence mechanism between advertising appeals and consumers' willingness to pay a premium for green agricultural products through (...) three sets of experimental studies. The findings demonstrate that self-construal and green agricultural product advertising appeals interact to influence consumers' willingness to pay a premium for green agricultural products. Green perceived value is more strongly influenced by matching dependent self-construal and green advertising appeals than non-green advertising appeals. Green perceived value plays a full mediating role in this interactive effect. Green agricultural products companies should adopt different advertising strategies according to the various categories of consumers to enhance consumers' green perceived value and increase the willingness to pay a premium. (shrink)

Plasma protein therapies are a group of essential medicines extracted from human plasma through processes of industrial scale fractionation. They are used primarily to treat a number of rare, chronic disorders ensuing from inherited or acquired deficiencies of a number of physiologically essential proteins. These disorders include hemophilia A and B, different immunodeficiencies and alpha 1-antitrypsin deficiency. In addition, acute blood loss, burns and sepsis are treated by PPTs. Hence, a population of vulnerable and very sick individuals is dependent on (...) these products. In addition, the continued well-being of large sections of the community, including pregnant women and their children, travelers and workers exposed to infectious risk is also subject to the availability of these therapies. Their manufacture to adequate amounts requires large volumes of human plasma as the starting material of a complex purification process. Mainstream blood transfusion services run primarily by the not-for-profit sector have attempted to provide this plasma through the separation of blood donations, but have failed to provide sufficient amounts to meet the clinical demand. The collection of plasma from donors willing to commit to the process of plasmapheresis, which is not only time consuming but requires a long term, continuing commitment, generates much higher amounts of plasma and has been an activity historically separate from the blood transfusion sector and run by commercial companies. These companies now supply two-thirds of the growing global need for these therapies, while the mainstream government-run blood sector continues to supply a shrinking proportion. The private sector plasmapheresis activity which provides the bulk of treatment products has been compensating the donors in order to recognize the time and effort required. Recent activities have reignited the debate regarding the ethical and medical aspects of such compensation. In this work, we review the landscape; assess the contributions made by the compensated and non-compensated sectors and synthesize the outcomes on the relevant patient communities of perturbing the current paradigm of compensated plasma donation. We conclude that the current era of “Patient Centeredness” in health care demands the continuation and extension of paid plasma donation. (shrink)

Electronic health records are likely to improve health care but in the U.S. they will also enable health insurers to be more selective in deciding to whom to deny coverage or whose premiums to increase. In a Rawlsian social contract (1971) the veil of ignorance does not conceal general scientific information from the hypothetical contracting parties. Nonetheless, this paper shows that social contract considerations rule out risk selection as morally impermissible. Since modern health care must in effect be paid (...) for by public or private insurance, and doing so is efficient, this is a basic part of health care justice. But for information ethics this argument does not extend beyond cases in which provision of information serves to deny a social primary good to members of society. (shrink)

This study uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to explore the intersections of gender and race on fathers' labor market outcomes. Fixed-effects models reveal that for married whites and Latinos, the birth of a child is associated with an increase in hourly wages, annual earnings, and annual time spent at work. For married Black men, the birth of a child is associated with a smaller increase in hourly wages and annual earnings but not associated with an increase (...) in annual time spent at work. Furthermore, married Black men do not experience an increase in hourly wages or work hours because of a reduction in their wives' work hours. In contrast, married whites and Latinos earn more when their wives work less. These findings imply that gendered workplace and family experiences differ among fathers and that not all men benefit from specific family formations in exactly the same way. (shrink)

Current assumptions and values with respect to management training for women are examined. A number of suggestions for change are made. The thrust of the changes will move us toward ensuring that education for women does not remain education for frustration, that is, education which gives women the desire for change in a world that remains the same.Many women have paid their dues, even a premium, for a chance at a top position, only to find a glass ceiling (...) between them and their goal. The glass ceiling is not simply a barrier for an individual, based on the person's inability to handle a higher-level job. Rather, the glass ceiling applies to women as a group who are kept from advancing higher because they are women. (Morrison, White and Velsor, 1987, p. 13). (shrink)

The emergence of so-called ‘gig work’, particularly that sold through digital platforms accessed through smartphone apps, has led to disputes about the proper classification of workers: Should platform workers be classified as independent contractors (as platforms typically insist), or as employees of the platforms through which they sell labor (as workers often claim)? Such disputes have urgency due to the way in which employee status is necessary to access certain benefits such as a minimum wage, sick pay, and so on. (...) In addition, classification disputes have philosophical significance because their resolution requires some foundational account of why the law should make a distinction between employed and freelance workers in the first place. This paper aims to fill this foundational gap. Central to it is the idea that employment involves a worker ceding certain freedoms in return for a degree of security, at least with respect to income. Insofar as the misclassification objection has force against digital platforms, it is when a platform is attempting to have it both ways: Workers are giving up freedom but not being granted a proportionate increase in security. As I shall explain, this approach offers some flexibility as to how actual disputes might be resolved – justice may be indifferent between whether platforms offer greater security or permit workers greater freedom, provided they do at least one of these things. (shrink)

A great deal of discussion in recent philosophy of language has centered on the idea that there might be hidden contextual parameters in our sentences. But relatively little attention has been paid to what those parameters themselves are like, beyond the assumption that they behave more or less like variables do in logic. My goal in this paper is to show this has been a mistake. I shall argue there are at least two very different sorts of contextual parameters. (...) One is indeed basically like variables in logic, but the other is very different, and much more like overt referring expressions. This result is of interest in its own right, to those of us who are concerned to map out the details of the semantic and pragmatic workings of language. But it will have some wider morals as well. One of the important issues behind the debate over hidden parameters has been how we can posit hidden structure in language, and how far such structure can stray from the intuitive forms and contents speakers see in communication. I shall argue that one sort of hidden parameter is surprisingly close to the contents and forms speakers find intuitive, while another is more remote. I shall show that the.. (shrink)

People in rich countries increasingly rely on paid workers to care for many of their health and personal care needs. We expect that, in most families, love or filial piety underpin caring relationships, and that these moral bonds ensure good quality care. If paid caring relationships are not underpinned by love, what moral bonds can they rely on? Exploring contract, professional duty, and compassionate gift as normative “resources” for good paid care, I conclude that we cannot expect (...) paid carers to reproduce an idealized private sphere. Instead we can expect “good enough” care, supported by a range of normative resources. (shrink)

This study examines whether journalists and bloggers label paid content. In Germany, as in many other countries, advertorials have to be designated as advertising to enable the target audience to identify the promotional character of the content. This applies both to the traditional mass media and to blogs, for which advertorials provide a key source of income. To date, there have been no empirical findings on the designation practice based on a comparison of journalists and bloggers. The present study (...) presents an online survey in Germany completed by 936 journalists and 463 bloggers in 2017. The results indicate that, in fact, bloggers do not label advertorials less frequently than journalists do: 91.6 % of bloggers and 91.7 % of journalists stated that they label paid content as advertising. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to propose a research agenda for future studies of local forms of caregiving. It does this by exploring practices of care giving and receipt through the prism of childcare. Focusing on Nairobi, it investigates one critical form of care work in the city: the labour of women who work as ‘nannies’ in private homes, a form of labour that has received little systematic study or scholarly attention. Every day, women in Nairobi construct complex and (...) far-ranging care chains that ensure that the socially necessary labour of childcare takes place. The phenomenon of ‘diverted mothering’ that has been associated with the globalisation of care can also be understood as a local phenomenon. Whereas global care chains involving migrant domestic workers have been the focus of detailed investigation, hitherto the workings of more widespread and highly fragile local care chains in the cities of the third world have been neglected. We argue that it is critical to understand practices of intimate and emotional labour in the context not just of global migration but in situations of severe intersecting inequalities within the global south. (shrink)

Although much has been written on the dead-donor rule in the last twenty-five years, scant attention has been paid to how it should be formulated, what its rationale is, and why it was accepted. The DDR can be formulated in terms of either a Don’t Kill rule or a Death Requirement, the former being historically rooted in absolutist ethics and the latter in a prudential policy aimed at securing trust in the transplant enterprise. I contend that the moral core (...) of the rule is the Don’t Kill rule, not the Death Requirement. This, I show, is how the DDR was understood by the transplanters of the 1960s, who sought to conform their practices to their ethics—unlike today’s critics of the DDR, who rethink their ethics in a question-begging fashion to accommodate their practices. A better discussion of the ethics of killing is needed to move the debate forward. (shrink)

Despite the biological turn of recent discussions of behavior, insufficient attention has been paid to methodological-philosophical issues about the experimental basis for talk of instincts, social or otherwise. This paper examines the credentials of one standard technique, the deprivation experiment, exploited by the ethologists in their efforts to provide an inventory of species-specific, innate behaviors. It is argued that, given some hypothetical facts and plausible theoretical assumptions (of D. S. Lehrman, Kurt Koffka, and others) about the role of environmental (...) factors in the development of behavioral repertoires, the ethologists' efforts to identify innate behaviors on the basis of the deprivation technique are not just futile but misguided. (shrink)

The relatively recent shift of family caregiving to the public market of service work raises questions about how to theorize paid caregiving. This article examines how to conceptualize child rearing when it is transferred to a paid worker. The gendered character of commodified caregiving is complicated by structural locations of race and class that define the employer-employee relationship. Previous discussions of paid child care work as emotionally meaningful work have been criticized as idealizations that mask the exploitative (...) nature of the work. Yet, emotional meaning is not simply a cover-up or an idealization of the labor; rather, it is an integral component of the work of caregiving, the practice of which is distorted by societal assumptions about gender and race. To better understand paid child care work, the significance of emotional meaning, as well as gender, race, and ethnic dimensions of paid child care work need to be explored. (shrink)

Personal narratives can let us in on aspects of reality which we have not experienced for ourselves, and are thus important sources for philosophical reflection. Yet a venerable tradition in mainstream philosophy has little room for arguments which rely on personal narrative, on the grounds that narratives are particular and testimonial, whereas philosophical arguments should be systematic and transparent. I argue that narrative arguments are an important form of philosophical argument. Their testimonial aspects witness to novel facets of reality, but (...) their argumentative aspects help us to understand those facets for ourselves. My argument takes the form of a case study of the exemplary narrative argument penned by Rachel Moran, a former prostitute who uses her experiences to argue that prostitution amounts to sexual abuse. We’ll see that narrative arguments can enjoy expository Advantages over analytic ones. (shrink)

Enthusiasts for the scientific character of Buddhism wax eloquent regarding the insights that the Buddhist tradition can deliver to cognitive science, and the contributions that meditative technique can make to understanding cognitive and affective processes. To be sure, there are contributions in this direction, though their significance may be overestimated. Less attention is paid to the value of cognitive theory for developing Buddhist insights in the 21 st Century, and the role of science in the dissemination of Buddhism in (...) the modern world. I will pay some attention to that value. I conclude with some remarks on the potential value of Buddhist psychology to the development of moral psychology, an area in which Buddhism has a great deal to contribute. (shrink)

Professional sport like most human activities undertaken for pay is subject to Article 23(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (“Equal Pay for Equal Work”). An athlete’s ‘work’ can be variously construed, however, as entertainment/profit generation, athletic performance, or effort. Feminist arguments for gender wage parity in professional sport based on the former two construals rely on counterfactual assumptions, given that most actual audiences and performances of athletes identifying as female do not (currently) equal those of athletes identifying as (...) male. But both philosophical and scientific accounts of the truth-conditions of counterfactual conditionals of the form ‘If conditions X obtained, then the entertainment value/performance of female athletes would equal that of male athletes’ remain uncertain. Construing athletic ‘work’ as effort, on the other hand, ties remuneration to a quasi-unobservable quantity, with paradoxical outcomes when varying levels of athletic or social disadvantage are taken into account. Appeal to procedural justice, finally, does not yield wage equality unless we make the same counterfactual assumptions, or postulate a right to equal remuneration on unrelated grounds of substantive justice. On either of these approaches, the case for gender wage parity in professional sport requires strengthening. (shrink)

As a prevalent source of work stress, illegitimate tasks offend employees’ professional identity and threaten individual self-view, then create many negative organizational outcomes. However, current studies have paid inadequate attention to the impact of IT on work disengagement and its influencing path, failing to comprehensively identify the negative effects of illegitimate tasks. Based on stress-as-offense-to-self theory and ego depletion theory, the influencing path of illegitimate tasks on WD is explored, and coworker emotional support and leisure crafting are introduced to (...) explore the intervention conditions on the impact of illegitimate tasks. By analyzing data from a survey of 260 employees, this study reveals the following findings: illegitimate tasks have a significantly positive impact on work disengagement; ED fully transmits the positive impact of illegitimate tasks on work disengagement; CES and LC not only attenuate the effect of illegitimate tasks on ego depletion, but also negatively moderate the indirect effect of illegitimate tasks on work disengagement through ego depletion. (shrink)

Anglo-American authors have paid little attention to a subtle distinction that has important jurisprudential implications. It is the distinction between sources of law and the legal norms which can be derived from sources by means of interpretation. The distinction might also be rendered as a threefold one, separating sources of law from legal norms and both of these from that which mediates their relation, namely, methods of legal interpretation. This paper intends to state the “source-norm” distinction clearly and to (...) give examples of jurisprudential insights that are missed, and mistakes that may be made if the distinction is not given its due. (shrink)

Recent studies have reported gender differences in older workers' orientations toward retirement, with women expressing less favorable views. This study of 557 women and 245 men in their 60s, not currently married, showed that previously married women, who often face a poor financial situation in retirement, were less likely than previously married men to agree that older workers should retire and also were less likely to define themselves as retirees. Never-married women and men did not differ on these measures of (...) retirement orientation, but they did differ on a more general measure of well-being, with the women holding a more positive attitude toward life in retirement. This article concludes that differences in women's and men's occupational and economic circumstances are responsible in part for gender differences reported in the retirement literature, but in addition, marital circumstances also exert an important influence. Thus retirement policies based solely on gender seem unwarranted. (shrink)

Whilst India has been debating how to regulate 'surrogacy' the UK has undergone a major consultation on increasing the amount of 'expenses'paid to egg 'donors', while France has recently finished debating its entire package of bioethics regulation and the role of its Biomedicine Agency. Although it is often claimed that there is no alternative to the neo-liberal, market-based approach in regulating (or not) reproductive medicine--the ideology prevalent in both India and the UK--advocates of that position ignore the alternative model (...) offered by France's tighter regulation, as well as its overarching concern with protecting the vulnerable and ensuring social justice. Whilst the concepts underpinning the French model of regulation also have their provenance in Western political philosophy and not in the developed world, they embody a very different attitude and suggest that there is indeed an alternative to letting the market decide. However, even in France that alternative is highly contested. (shrink)

Despite significant progress in real-world (nonideal) political philosophy focused on overcoming injustice and inequality, there has not been concomitant attention paid to _who_ will take up these projects. Agents tend to be treated in this literature, if at all, as epiphenomenal to substantive normative theorising on social change. To rectify this, Ben Laurence has made perhaps the most systematic case so far for philosophers to identify agents of change as an integral part of their work, with sensitivity to levels (...) of motivation and feasibility. However, his account risks mirroring the status quo biases of an unjust world. Normative theory must retain a commitment to the possibilities for _generating_ potential agents of change in the face of injustice. In response, I propose an approach that is at once universal and pluralistic, grounded in the complexity of agents as they are and yet morally ambitious about what they can become. This incorporates three neglected aspects of change-making agency. First, the ordinary person as a citizen. Second, the ‘black box’ of group agents and how individual agency operates inside structures such as states, firms, or civil society. Third, the indiscernible contributions in the build-up to rapid, visible change. I call these neglected forms of change-making agency, respectively, ‘agency from below’, ‘agency inside agents’, and ‘concealed agency’. Together, they comprise the building blocks for a new theory of agency. (shrink)

In the civilizations of the classical West, as exemplified foremost by that of Greece, as well as in that of early imperial China, the idea that humans who excelled exceptionally in war could merit deification was an abiding operative assumption. Given this premise, unsurprising then is the fact that such individuals should be found to have exhibited certain defining traits in common, including exceptional bravery and skill in leadership as well as—at least up until the point of their own deaths—an (...) outstanding record of battlefield success. In addition, whether in Greece or in China, we find that the elevation of the exemplary warrior to the status of a god occurred under religious auspices, or was abetted by a belief structure that at least exhibited many of the core customary functions of a conventional religion. However, if we must regard the normative Chinese paradigm of martial divinization as having consistently departed in conception from its counterpart in the West, then surely the determinative difference is the premium placed on the Chinese demonstration of loyalty. In China, inasmuch as there were credentials for deification, the individual warrior’s unfailing subscription to the virtue of loyalty seems to have superseded all else, and the pathway to immortality as a god was forever obstructed without it. (shrink)

The bulk of the literature on the relationship between art and morality is principally concerned with an aesthetic question: Do moral flaws with works of art constitute aesthetic flaws?1 Much less attention has been paid to the ways in which artworks can be morally flawed. There are at least three promising contenders that concern aesthetic education: Artworks can be morally flawed by endorsing immorality, corrupting audiences, and encouraging responses that are bad to have. When it comes to works of (...) fiction, the third suggestion requires what Allan Hazlett calls response moralism—the position that audience reactions to artworks can be morally bad.2 Here, I will put aside issues of aesthetic.. (shrink)

An Indian Court recently awarded 50,000 rupees damages to a couple who gave birth to their fourth daughter. The couple were mistakenly told they were carrying a male fetus. The doctor mistook a section of the umbilical cord for a penis. The husband said: “We are already struggling to raise three children. This was a big sacrifice for us to have a fourth child. We would have had an abortion if we had known it was a girl”. The cost of (...) damages amounted to the dowry they would have to pay at the time of their daughter's marriage.This is a fictional case. But the cases of Nicholas Perruche and Lionel1 are not fictional. According to reports, damages were paid to these children on the basis of what the media has described as a “right not to be born”. Is there a “right not to be born?” Was it right to compensate Nicholas Perruche for being born with congenital rubella and Lionel for being born with Down's syndrome?HARM TO THE CHILDWhat constitutes a right is a complex question. On one interpretation, rights protect interests. This implies that a right not to be born would exist if a child had an interest in not being born. Is it ever in a child's interests not to have been born? If it were, this might imply the child is better off dead than alive, as the Collective against Handiphobia claim. Is it better to be dead than have Down's syndrome?Some people do believe that Down's syndrome constitutes a life not worth living.2 But this view seems false. Children with Down's syndrome can and often do lead happy and worthwhile lives. After all, we do not suggest that other animals have a right not to be born or a life not worth …. (shrink)

During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy, practitioners had to make tragic decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources in the ICU. The Italian debate has paid a lot of attention to identifying the specific regulatory criteria for the allocation of resources in the ICU; in this paper, however, we argue that deciding such criteria is not enough for the implementation of fair and transparent allocative decisions. In this respect, we discuss three ethical issues: (a) in (...) the Italian context, the treating physician, rather than a separate committee, was generally the one responsible for the allocation decision; (b) although many allocative guidelines have supported moral equivalence between withholding and withdrawing treatments, some health professionals have continued to consider it a morally problematic aspect; and (c) the health workers who have had to make the aforementioned decisions or even only worked in ICU during the pandemic often experienced moral distress. We conclude by arguing that, even if these problems are not directly related to the above-mentioned issues of distributive justice, they can nevertheless directly affect the quality and ethics of the implementation of allocative criteria, regardless of those chosen. (shrink)