Burnout is characterized by emotional exhaustion and caused by exposure to excessive and prolonged stress related to job conditions. Moreover, burnout is highly prevalent among health care professionals. The aim of this study is, first, to examine the mediating role of social support over the effect of burnout in health care professionals and, second, to explore potential gender differences. A convenience sample of 1,035 health professionals from Ecuador, including 608 physicians and 427 nurses, was surveyed using the Maslach Burnout Inventory, (...) Social Support Survey, and General Health Questionnaire as measures of burnout, social support, and general health, respectively. Social support was found to mediate the negative effects of burnout on health regardless of gender. Differences across the three dimensions of burnout and health are further discussed, along with their implications for designing effective burnout interventions for health care professionals in Ecuador. (shrink)

Through theoretical discussion, literature review, and a computational model, this paper poses a challenge to the notion that perspective-taking involves a fixed architecture in which particular processes have priority. For example, considerable work has shown that egocentric perspectives can arise more quickly, with other perspectives (such as of task partners) emerging only secondarily. This theoretical dichotomy is challenged here, and we propose a general view of perspective-taking as an emergent phenomenon governed by the interplay among several cognitive mechanisms. We first (...) describe the pervasive relevance of perspective-taking to cognitive science. A dynamical systems model is then introduced which explicitly formulates the timescale interaction proposed. Implications are discussed, with ideas for future empirical research. (shrink)

In this article I present HYPER-REF, a model to determine the referent of any given expression in First-Order Logic. I also explain how this model can be used to determine the referent of a first-order theory such as First-Order Arithmetic. By reference or referent I mean the non-empty set of objects that the syntactical terms of a well-formed formula pick out given a particular interpretation of the language. To do so, I will first draw on previous work to make explicit (...) the notion of reference and its hyperintensional features. Then I present HYPER-REF and offer a heuristic method for determining the reference of any formula. Then I discuss some of the benefits and most salient features of HYPER-REF, including some remarks on the nature of self-reference in formal languages. (shrink)

A partir de una presentación general del concepto de especie aplicado a los humanos, este texto expone dos nociones generales sobre la naturaleza humana: la tipológica y la filogenética. Una vez expuestos los fundamentos de cada noción, se defiende una distinción entre naturaleza humana e identidad humana como dos aspectos que se han confundido respecto a este problema, pero que cumplen distintos roles en las explicaciones, por lo que se proponen como dos nociones complementarias. Así, la naturaleza humana estaría definida (...) en términos metafísicos y daría cuenta de la realidad biológica de los humanos desde un punto de vista filogenético, mientras que la identidad humana estaría definida en términos epistemológicos y daría cuenta de los conocimientos que tienen los humanos sobre ellos mismos, aludiendo a aspectos contingentes. (shrink)

Ethical Aspects Related to Nursing Care for Persons with Disabilities: A Qualitative Analysis Aspectos éticos relacionados com a atenção de enfermagem em pessoas com deficiência: uma análise qualitativa The purpose of the study is to describe ethical aspects related to nursing care for persons with disabilities; a population considered socially vulnerable and in conditions of inequality. It corresponds to the first phase of a primary study conducted in Atacama, Chile using a qualitative methodology and content analysis. Nursing graduates are interviewed (...) respecting Ezekiel Emanuel’s ethical criteria. The main findings account for ontological categories such as moral reasoning, value system, nurse-patient relationship model, consequences of the ethical nursing action, strategies to overcome moral conflicts, and barriers in care. It is concluded that caring for people with disabilities is a source of dilemma and moral anguish for nurses, especially when it comes to individuals with sensitive or cognitive disabilities. The paternalistic medical model predominates in the clinical context, limiting the right to autonomy of persons with disabilities. Instrumental values such as efficiency are added to traditional moral values promoted by nurses. Civic values considered fundamental to the challenge of human diversity and life in a democracy are not mentioned. Para citar este artículo / To reference this article / Para citar este artigo Campillay-Campillay M, Rivas-Rivero E, Dubó-Araya P, Calle-Carrasco A. Aspectos éticos relacionados con la atención de enfermería en personas en situación de discapacidad: un análisis cualitativo. Pers Bioet. 2020;24:43-56. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5294/pebi.2020.24.1.4 Recibido: 19/07/2019 Aceptado: 12/11/2019 Publicado: 07/05/2020. (shrink)

Este artículo estudia la hipotética penetración del islamismo –vertiente degradada del Islam- en algunos sectores de la extrema izquierda en Latinoamérica y reflexiona sobre su habilidad para desarrollar tanto una teoría como una práctica islamizadas de la revolución. El objetivo de esto es indagar en un aspecto inusual de la seguridad, el factor ideológico, habitualmente soslayado por preferirse los elementos estratégicos y tácticos. Para ello primero se investigan someramente algunos cambios del terrorismo ligados al islamismo en Latinoamérica. Después se analiza (...) la doctrina mediante la que el islamismo puede conectar con la extrema izquierda mediante los conceptos de revolución, guerra revolucionaria, guerra asimétrica y yihad. Finalmente están las conclusiones del artículo. (shrink)

El presente artículo traza la semblanza intelectual y profesional del religioso José Mª Salvador y Barrera, natural de Marchena, que llegó a ser Rector del Colegio del Sacro Monte de Granada, Obispo de Tarazona, Obispo de Madrid-Alcalá, Arzobispo de Valencia y Senador, y que dedicó todos sus esfuerzos a defender la enseñanza religiosa y la acción social de la Iglesia desde los altos puestos que ocupó. Fue además un excelente orador y persona de gran cultura, siendo reconocida su labor por (...) las Reales Academias de la Historia y de Ciencias Morales y Políticas, que le eligieron como académico de número. El obispo Salvador fue realmente uno de los prelados más competentes y aperturistas de los dos primeros decenios del siglo XX. (shrink)

Este artículo propone una lectura metafísica de tres problemas que atraviesan el corazón de la Fenomenología del Espíritu: a) la condición de abertura constitutiva del espíritu; b) el Deseo como estado de dirección Hacia; y c) la vida como condición de abertura y como estado de dirección Hacia: la VIDA. Para llegar a la elaboración de esta clave de lectura, dividiremos el presente estudio en tres recorridos organizados a partir de dos figuras coordinadas: en el primero, trataremos de caracterizar la (...) condición de abertura y de manera abreviada el estado de dirección Hacia que caracteriza al espíritu individual en el nivel de la certeza sensible; en el segundo, examinaremos el estado de dirección hacia Hacia, como Deseo; y, finalmente, reelaboraremos las dos figuras en tanto condiciones que hacen posible la VIDA del espíritu, en general. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo es mostrar la importancia que tiene recuperar el concepto de «ideología» y con él la labor de crítica ideológica en la teoría del derecho. En las teorías positivistas de Kelsen y Ross era uno de los conceptos centrales, pero cayó paulatinamente en desuso en la segunda mitad del siglo xx, tanto a nivel político como en el campo específico de la teoría jurídica. En este trabajo se examinan algunas de las razones por las que se (...) dejó de utilizar y se propone un concepto de «ideología» capaz de evitar esos cuestionamientos. Por último, se ponen de manifiesto las consecuencias perjudiciales (tanto teóricas como prácticas) que trae aparejado el abandono de la crítica ideológica en la teoría jurídica. Se utiliza como caso de estudio la concepción postpositivista sobre la naturaleza del derecho defendida por Manuel Atienza y algunas de las decisiones argumentativas que el propio Atienza ha adoptado guiado por ella en una polémica sobre el estatus normativo de la gestación por sustitución en la práctica jurídica española. (shrink)

Objetivo: El siguiente artículo tiene como propósito la revisión de la literatura existente cuyo enfoque sea las herramientas tecnológicas utilizadas para el abordaje del paciente con síntomas de salud mental, de manera virtual, para describir las ventajas, la eficacia, la efectividad y los beneficios de estas herramientas, a partir de la literatura encontrada. Métodos: se realizó una búsqueda en las bases de datos Pubmed, Elsevier, UpToDate, Journal of Medical Internet Research y Google Académico. Se identificó un total de 58 artículos (...) que versan sobre la eficacia y efectividad de las diferentes modalidades digitales (tales como aplicaciones, cuestionarios en línea, mensajes de texto, etc.) que tratan la salud mental. Resultados: la búsqueda realizada arrojó un total de 58 artículos. Tras la eliminación de duplicados, el número fue de 50 artículos. Después de la caracterización de la información basada en la revisión de la totalidad del contenido, fueron elegidos 30 artículos para que sirvieran como base para la construcción de la síntesis de datos. Conclusiones: las herramientas virtuales utilizadas en salud mental ofrecen un sin fin de beneficios para prestar un servicio con un acceso más sencillo a la población, de forma económica y efectiva, sin temor a que los pacientes sean estigmatizados al momento de buscar ayuda, como se pudo evidenciar en los artículos presentados. Además, las herramientas digitales utilizadas en psiquiatría han demostrado ser eficaces y seguras, sin embargo, son de reciente aparición y cuentan con una cantidad limitada de estudios que demuestren objetivamente su eficacia en esta área. (shrink)

Databases play a fundamental role in today’s world, being used by most companies, especially those that offer services through the Internet. Today there is a wide variety of database models, each adapted for use according to the specific requirements of each application. Traditionally, the relational models with centralized architectures have been used mostly due to their simplicity and general-purpose query language, which made relational systems suitable for almost any application. However, with the growth of the Internet in recent decades, both (...) in the number of users and in the amount of information, those centralized models began to suffer availability and scalability issues. To address those issues, the use of decentralized architectures and alternative database models began to arise, eventually replacing relational databases and centralized architectures when the requirements on availability and scalability are high. Those database models alternative to the traditional relational model are grouped under the name of NoSQL. In this article, we present a NoSQL database developed as an end of degree work, with a flexible data model based on documents and a fully decentralized architecture based on the Gossip protocol for node discovery and a distributed hash table, in particular the rendezvous hashing algorithm, used to distribute and replicate the data across all the nodes. The main goals of the system are to achieve high availability and high scalability. High availability is achieved thanks to the replication of the data, while high scalability is achieved by its decentralized architecture, which allows multiple entry points from the requests, and the data distribution, effectively increasing the database capacity by increasing the number of nodes. (shrink)

The global pesticide complex has transformed over the past two decades, but social science research has not kept pace. The rise of an enormous generics sector, shifts in geographies of pesticide production, and dynamics of agrarian change have led to more pesticide use, expanding to farm systems that hitherto used few such inputs. Declining effectiveness due to pesticide resistance and anemic institutional support for non-chemical alternatives also have driven intensification in conventional systems. As an inter-disciplinary network of pesticide scholars, we (...) seek to renew the social science research agenda on pesticides to better understand this suite of contemporary changes. To identify research priorities, challenges, and opportunities, we develop the pesticide complex as a heuristic device to highlight the reciprocal and iterative interactions among agricultural practice, the agrochemical industry, civil society-shaped regulatory actions, and contested knowledge of toxicity. Ultimately, collaborations among social scientists and across the social and biophysical sciences can illuminate recent transformations and their uneven socioecological effects. A reinvigorated critical scholarship that embraces the multifaceted nature of pesticides can identify the social and ecological constraints that drive pesticide use and support alternatives to chemically driven industrial agriculture. (shrink)

El artículo presenta una propuesta para promover la comprensión de las nociones de posibilidad, necesidad y validez argumental. Por medio de un criterio psicológico, la propuesta busca que los estudiantes capten dichas nociones de forma intuitiva antes de comenzar a usar las pruebas formales de validez. Se muestra cómo puede adaptarse la propuesta en el uso de los diagramas de Venn y en la diagramación de algunas formas silogísticas que la teoría clásica del silogismo considera válidas pero que no aparecen (...) como formas válidas en la diagramación canónica que usa los diagramas de Venn. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es evaluar si la estrategia populista conlleva oportunidades o peligros para la democracia y para ello se analizan los principales elementos del discurso populista a la luz de las intervenciones de dos líderes europeos, Pablo Iglesias y Marine Le Pen. Se sostiene que la estrategia populista no implica por sí misma un riesgo para la democracia sino que depende del tipo de demandas sociales que se articulen y de los valores hegemónicos que se quieran (...) transmitir a la opinión pública. La estructura del artículo es la siguiente: en primer lugar, se realiza una revisión crítica de la literatura sobre populismo; en segundo lugar, se analizan tanto la estructura formal como el carácter vacuo y disputado del discurso populista a partir de las intervenciones de Iglesias y Le Pen; por último, se presentan unas reflexiones finales. (shrink)

En el artículo se exponen dos asuntos básicos: primero, más amplio, la aproximación literaria desde la semántica de lo bello a algunos pasajes literarios, y, segundo, más breve, la pregunta sobre qué significa valorar desde el punto de vista estético una pieza literaria; el primero permite introducir en el tema más genérico que indica lo segundo. Se resaltan dos temas que rodean a lo bello: el terror y lo erótico, unas relaciones que buscan desarrollar desde tres textos distintos: uno contemporáneo (...) de la poesía de Pablo Neruda y dos textos antiguos tomados de la literatura sagrada de la biblia judía y cristiana; la revisión de los textos permite ver los siguientes temas que se tratan por separado: primero, la belleza que redime lo abyecto; segundo, la belleza contemplada atípicamente desde lo sórdido, y, tercero, lo bello inefable o la imagen de terror como única expresión de la fuerza devastadora del eros. (shrink)

This essay explores the relation between two perspectives on the nature of human rights. According to the "political" or "practical" perspective, human rights are claims that individuals have against certain institutional structures, in particular modern states, in virtue of interests they have in contexts that include them. According to the more traditional "humanist" or "naturalistic" perspective, human rights are pre-institutional claims that individuals have against all other individuals in virtue of interests characteristic of their common humanity. This essay argues that (...) once we identify the two perspectives in their best light, we can see that they are complementary and that in fact we need both to make good normative sense of the contemporary practice of human rights. It explains how humanist and political considerations can and should work in tandem to account for the concept, content, and justification of human rights. (shrink)

What should our theorizing about social justice aim at? Many political philosophers think that a crucial goal is to identify a perfectly just society. Amartya Sen disagrees. In The Idea of Justice, he argues that the proper goal of an inquiry about justice is to undertake comparative assessments of feasible social scenarios in order to identify reforms that involve justice-enhancement, or injustice-reduction, even if the results fall short of perfect justice. Sen calls this the “comparative approach” to the theory of (...) justice. He urges its adoption on the basis of a sustained critique of the former approach, which he calls “transcendental.” In this paper I pursue two tasks, one critical and the other constructive. First, I argue that Sen’s account of the contrast between the transcendental and the comparative approaches is not convincing, and second, I suggest what I take to be a broader and more plausible account of comparative assessments of justice. The core claim is that political philosophers should not shy away from the pursuit of ambitious theories of justice (including, for example, ideal theories of perfect justice), although they should engage in careful consideration of issues of political feasibility bearing on their practical implementation. (shrink)

This paper examines employees’ reactions to Corporate Social Responsibility programs at the attitudinal level. The results presented are drawn from an in-depth study of two Chilean construction firms that have well-established CSR programs. Grounded theory was applied to the data prior to the construction of the conceptual framework. The analysis shows that the implementation of CSR programs generates two types of attitudes in employees: attitudes toward the organization and attitudes toward society. These two broad types of attitudes can then be (...) broken down into four different categories : acceptance of the new role of the organization, identification with the organization, importance attached to the work performed and a sense of social justice. In turn, each of these categories is a grouping of many different concepts, some of which have at first sight little to do with CSR. Finally, the analysis reveals an attitudinal employee typology: the committed worker, the indifferent worker, and the dissident worker. (shrink)

Do we have positive duties to help others in need or are our moral duties only negative, focused on not harming them? If these positive duties exist, are they strong and strict demands or are they weak and discretionary? Can we say that at least some positive duties of assistance are also duties of justice worthy of institutionalization and coercive enforcement by legal institutions? Can the scope of some of such duties be cosmopolitan or should all of them be circumscribed (...) to what we owe to our compatriots? This paper addresses these questions from a Kantian perspective, and argues that Kant’s practical philosophy provides sufficient resources to develop and defend the claim that there are basic positive duties of justice, some of which have a global scope. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of human dignity based on a discussion of Kant's moral and political philosophy and then shows its relevance for articulating and developing in a fresh way some normative dimensions of Marx’s critique of capitalism as involving exploitation, domination, and alienation, and the view of socialism as involving a combination of freedom and solidarity. What is advanced here is not Kant’s own conception of dignity, but an account that partly builds on that conception and partly criticizes (...) it. The same is the case with the account of socialism in relation to Marx’s work. As articulated, Kantian dignity and Marxian socialism turn out to be quite appealing and mutually supportive. (shrink)

The idea of dignity is pervasive in political discourse. It is central to human rights theory and practice, and it features regularly in conceptions of social justice as well as in the social movements they seek to understand or orient. However, dignity talk has been criticized for leading to problematic exclusion. Critics challenge it for undermining our recognition of the rights of non-human animals and of many human individuals (such as children, the elderly, and people with disabilities). I argue that, (...) on a plausible articulation of it, the idea of dignity does not lead to these exclusions and that it in fact helps defend an appropriately inclusive moral and political treatment of all individuals. Difficult issues about equality and diversity indeed arise, but a dignitarian approach can provide good answers to them or at least help make them clearer and more tractable. (shrink)

This article provides a survey of the emerging debate on the political representation of nonhuman animals. In Section 1, I identify some of the reasons why the interests of animals are often disregarded in policy-making, and present two arguments why these interests should be considered. In Section 2, I introduce four institutional proposals that have been discussed in the relevant literature. Section 3 attempts to make explicit the underlying logic of each proposal (i.e. which specific problems it wants to tackle). (...) Section 4 discusses some of the main normative pros and cons of each proposal. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

Most research studying the corporate social performance –corporate financial performance link has utilized developed country samples. Also, this literature has generally focused on a wide variety of industries, ignoring the fact that certain sectors – such as controversial industries – have graver social and environmental issues. Hence, a gap exists in this tradition when it comes to emerging markets and controversial industries. This paper attempts to fill this void by providing preliminary evidence and insight on the matter. Based on an (...) exploration in six Latin American countries and five controversial industries, we find a negative bidirectional association between CSP and CFP. These results tend to contradict the mainstream conclusion of a positive bidirectional link, suggesting that institutional and market-level forces play a major role in shaping this relationship. (shrink)

Since time immemorial, the phenomenon of leadership and its understanding has attracted the attention of the business world because of its important role in human groups. Nevertheless, for years efforts to understand this concept have only been centred on people in leadership roles, thus overlooking an important aspect in its understanding: the necessary moral dimension which is implicit in the relationship between leader and follower. As an illustrative example of the importance of considering good morality in leadership, an empirical study (...) is conducted in which a good performance of the "leader-follower" relationship is reflected when individuals perceive ethical leadership in higher hierarchical managerial levels. To be precise, findings of this study demonstrate that follower job response is improved through an ethics trickle-down partial effect from the Top Manager to the immediate supervisor, and also reveal both key aspects and managerial level on which the practice of ethical leadership should rest upon to have a stronger effect on the follower positive job response. Practical implications of these findings and directions for future research are finally presented. (shrink)

How should political power and influence be allocated in democratic systems? That is, roughly, the core of the boundary problem in democratic theory. As of late, some authors have begun paying increased attention to the methodological aspects of this dispute. This paper attempts to make a twofold contribution to this ‘methodological turn’. On the one hand, it identifies and analyzes five desiderata of a successful principle of democratic inclusion. Any such principle, I argue, must be grounded in a clearly identifiable (...) set of values, must provide a clear standard of inclusion, must specify the relevant modalities of inclusion, must provide sound bridging principles, and must be extensionally adequate. In the first half of the paper, these desiderata are developed and critically scrutinized. On the other hand, I also extract three lessons from the previous discussion. First, that a unique answer to the boundary problem (i.e. one grounded in one single principle) is unlikely. Second, that a satisfactory answer to the boundary problem need not necessarily appeal, as some have argued, to distinctively democratic values. And third, that intuitions about political exclusion (i.e. those requiring or permitting the exclusion of some individuals) should be treated with special caution. (shrink)

This paper offers a normative exploration of what exploitation is and of what is wrong with it. The focus is on the critical assessment of the exploitation of workers in capitalist societies. Such exploitation is wrongful when it involves a contra-solidaristic use of power to benefit oneself at the expense of others. Wrongful exploitation consists in using your greater power, and sometimes even in making other less powerful than you, in order to get them to benefit you more than they (...) ought to. This account of exploitation is appealing because it simultaneously captures three morally significant dimensions of exploitation—its material and social background, the relational (interpersonal and systemic) attitudes it enacts, and the final distributive results it generates. Exploitation is indeed a multidimensional social process. The flipside of the proposed critical characterization of this process is a positive ideal of solidaristic empowerment in the allocation and use of economic power, which the paper articulates in terms of the socialist Abilities/Needs Principle (“from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”). The Abilities/Needs Principle is grounded in human dignity. (shrink)

The current legal and political practice of human rights invokes entitlements to freely chosen work, to decent working conditions, and to form and join labor unions. Despite the importance of these rights, they remain under-explored in the philosophical literature on human rights. This article offers a systematic and constructive discussion of them. First, it surveys the content and current relevance of the labor rights stated in the most important documents of the human rights practice. Second, it gives a moral defense (...) of these rights arguing that their support involves an appropriate response to important human interests and to the human dignity of workers. Finally, it explores central normative issues about the relation between labor rights and human dignity. It responds to some objections about the importance of work, explains why labor human rights may not exhaust the demands of dignity regarding labor and arbitrates a common tension between independence and solidarity within our practical affirmation of human dignity. (shrink)

Perfectionism about well-being is, at a minimum, the view that people’s lives go well when, and because they realize their capacities. It is common to link perfectionism with an idea of human essence or nature, to yield the view that what constitutes people’s well-being is the development and exercise of characteristically human capacities. The first part of this paper considers the very serious problems associated with the idea of human nature or essence, and argues that perfectionism would be more plausible (...) if it abandons reliance on it and focuses instead on the unfolding of some valuable capacities that need not be unique to, or shared by all human beings. This revised perfectionism is evaluative all the way down, pragmatic but not unprincipled, and holistic. In its second part, the paper articulates this account in terms of the dignitarian approach—the view that we have reason to organize our personal and social life in such a way that we respond appropriately to the valuable features of individuals that give rise to their dignity. Dignity is a non-conventional, normative status based on a diverse and disjunctive set of valuable capacities. The dignitarian approach helps develop, defend, and identify the implications of the revised perfectionism suggested in the previous part of the paper while also allowing us to make sense of the role of some generalizations that animated some of the plausibility of traditional perfectionism—and this without the pitfalls of reliance on an idea of human nature. On this paper’s proposed view—Dignitarian Perfectionism—human individuals’ well-being consists, at least in part, in developing and exercising the capacities at the basis of their dignity. (shrink)

What is a duty of justice? And how is it different from a duty of beneficence? We need a clear account of the contrast. Unfortunately, there is no consensus in the philosophical literature as to how to characterize it. Different articulations of it have been provided, but it is hard to identify a common core that is invariant across them. In this paper, I propose an account of how to understand duties of justice, explain how it contrasts with several proposals (...) as to how to distinguish justice and beneficence, respond to some objections and suggest further elaborations of it. The conceptual exploration pursued in this paper has practical stakes. A central aim is to propose and defend a capacious concept of justice that makes a direct discussion of important demands of justice (domestic and global) possible. Duties of justice can be positive besides negative, they can be imperfect as well as perfect, they can range over personal besides institutional contexts, they can include multiple associative reasons such us non-domination, non-exploitation and reciprocity, and they can even go beyond existing national, political, and economic associative frameworks to embrace strictly universal humanist concerns. We should reject ideological abridgments of the concept of justice that render these possibilities, and the important human interests and claims they may foster, invisible. (shrink)

The main purpose of these introductory remarks is to give the reader a sense of Philip Rossi’s philosophical project and its importance. I will then advance an interpretation of what motivates Kant’s commitment to community, and, on its basis, object to Rossi’s views on radical evil –a point which affects how one should conceive the moral vocation of humanity and the role that politics and religion play within it. My reconstruction concludes with a sketch of how the five contributions to (...) this Symposium fit together and deepen our understanding of Rossi’s overall project. (shrink)

Whenever a fact P grounds another fact Q, one may ask why that is so. Karen Bennett and Louis deRosset independently argue that grounding facts—such as the fact that P grounds Q—are always grounded in their grounds-part. Bennett calls this the view that grounding is superinternal. My aim in this paper is to argue that grounding is not superinternal. I will do so by showing that superinternality, together with some widely accepted formal features of grounding—namely, transitivity and necessitation—yield implausible claims (...) about how necessities are explained. Then, I will discuss how my argument compares with Dasgupta's argument against superinternality. (shrink)

Whenever a fact P grounds another fact Q, one may ask why that is so. Karen Bennett and Louis deRosset independently argue that grounding facts—such as the fact that P grounds Q—are always grounded in their grounds-part. Bennett calls this the view that grounding is superinternal. My aim in this paper is to argue that grounding is not superinternal. I will do so by showing that superinternality, together with some widely accepted formal features of grounding—namely, transitivity and necessitation—yield implausible claims (...) about how necessities are explained. Then, I will discuss how my argument compares with Dasgupta’s argument against superinternality. (shrink)

Human rights are particularly relevant in contexts in which there are significant asymmetries of power, but where these asymmetries exist the human rights project turns out to be especially difficult to realize. The stronger can use their disproportionate power both to threaten others’ human rights and to frustrate attempts to secure their fulfillment. They may even monopolize the international discussion as to what human rights are and how they should be implemented. This paper explores this tension between the normative ideal (...) of human rights and the facts of asymmetric power. It has two objectives. The first, pursued in section 2, is to reconstruct and assess a set of important power-related worries about human rights. These worries are sometimes presented as falsifying the view that human rights exist, or at least as warranting the abandonment of human rights practice. The paper argues that the worries do not support such conclusions. Instead, they motivate the identification of certain desiderata for the amelioration of human rights practice. The paper proceeds to articulate twelve such desiderata. The second objective, pursued in section 3, is to propose a strategy for satisfying the desiderata identified in the previous section. In particular, the paper suggests some ways to build empowerment into the human rights project that reduce the absolute and relative powerlessness of human rights holders, while also identifying an ethics of responsibility and solidarity for contexts in which power asymmetries will not dissolve. Power analysis does not debunk the human rights project. Properly articulated, it is an important tool for those pursuing it. (shrink)

Three ethics program components, a code of ethics, ethics training initiatives and ethics-oriented performance appraisal content, were examined for their relationship to ethical intent using a sample of 525 employees from the Spanish financial services industry. As expected, all three components contributed to the prediction of ethical intent. Importantly, clusters of employees who reported experiencing distinct combinations of the program components were identified and compared for their level of ethical intent. Employees who perceived all three components to be strongly implemented (...) reported significantly higher levels of ethical intent relative to those who viewed the components as either all weakly implemented or not present. Combinations including training initiatives plus one other element had a similar impact to the fully implemented approach. Contrary to expectations, ethics-oriented performance appraisal content did not relate more strongly to ethical intent than codes of ethics. (shrink)

This paper presents a substantivist construal of discourse ethics, which claims that we should see our engagement in public deliberation as expressing and elaborating a substantive commitment to basic moral ideas of solidarity, equality, and freedom. This view is different from Habermas's standard formalist defence of discourse ethics, which attempts to derive the principle of discursive moral justification from primarily non-moral presuppositions of rational argumentation as such. After explicating the difference between the substantivist and the formalist construal, I defend the (...) former by showing that it is not only intuitively compelling, but also particularly well equipped for addressing four important objections recently levelled against discourse ethics and its political applications. I conclude by pointing out some consequences of the previous discussion for the future of Critical Theory. (shrink)

While acoustic analysis methods have become a commodity in voice emotion research, experiments that attempt not only to describe but to computationally manipulate expressive cues in emotional voice...

Are positive duties to help others in need mere informal duties of virtue or can they also be enforceable duties of justice? In this paper I defend the claim that some positive duties (which I call basic positive duties) can be duties of justice against one of the most important prin- cipled objections to it. This is the libertarian challenge, according to which only negative duties to avoid harming others can be duties of justice, whereas positive duties (basic or nonbasic) (...) must be seen, at best, as informal moral requirements or recommendations. I focus on the contractarian version of the libertarian challenge as recently presented by Jan Narveson. I claim that Narveson’s contractarian construal of libertarianism is not only intuitively weak, but is also subject to decisive internal problems. I argue, in particular, that it does not pro- vide a clear rationale for distinguishing between informal duties of virtue and enforceable duties of justice, that it can neither successfully justify libertarianism’s protection of negative rights nor its denial of positive ones, and that it fails to undermine the claim that basic positive duties are duties of global justice. -/- . (shrink)