Recognizing the growing interdependence of the European Union and the importance of codes of conduct in companies’ operations, this research examines the effect of a country’s culture on the implementation of a code of conduct in a European context. We examine whether the perceptions of an activity’s ethicality relates to elements found in company codes of conduct vary by country or according to Hofstede’s (1980, Culture’s Consequences (Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, CA)) cultural constructs of: Uncertainty Avoidance, Masculinity/Femininity, Individualism, and Power (...) Distance. The 294 individuals, who participated in our study, were from 8 Western European countries. Their responses to our 13 scenarios indicate that differences in the perceptions of ethicality associate primarily with the participants’ country as opposed to their employer (i.e., accounting firm), employment level, or gender. The evidence also indicates that these country differences associate with Hofstede constructs of Individualism and Masculinity. (shrink)

Thomas E. Hill, Jr., interprets and extends Kant's moral theory in a series of essays that highlight its relevance to contemporary ethics. He introduces the major themes of Kantian ethics and explores its practical application to questions about revolution, prison reform, and forcible interventions in other countries for humanitarian purposes.

E. J. Lowe; The problems of intrinsic change: rejoinder to Lewis, Analysis, Volume 48, Issue 2, 1 March 1988, Pages 72–77, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/48.2.7.

Insight experiences are sudden, persuasive, and can accompany valuable new ideas in science and art. In this preregistered experiment, we aim to validate a novel visceral and continuous measure of insight problem solving and to test whether real-time and embodied feelings of insight can predict correct solutions. We report several findings. Consistent with recent work, we find a strong positive relationship between Aha moments and accuracy for problems that demand implicit processing. We also found that the intensity of the insight (...) experience further predicted the accuracy of solutions and participants naturally embodied the intensity of their insight experiences by squeezing the dynamometer more tightly. Intriguingly, this unintentional embodiment further predicted the accuracy of solutions. We suggest that the dynamometer complements previous measures by (1) simultaneously capturing both process and feeling in real-time, (2) highlights the value of measuring Aha moments on a continuum of intensity, and (3) firmly establishes that the impulsive feeling of Aha can carry information about the veracity of an idea. We discuss the findings in light of a recent theoretical account of how feelings of insight may act as a heuristic to select ideas from the stream of consciousness. (shrink)

In light of the development of “CRISPR” technology, new promising advances in therapeutic and preventive approaches have become a reality. However, with it came many ethical challenges. The most recent worldwide condemnation of the first use of CRISPR to genetically modify a human embryo is the latest example of ethically questionable use of this new and emerging field. Monotheistic religions are very conservative about such changes to the human genome and can be considered an interference with God’s creation. Moreover, these (...) changes could cause perpetual changes to future generations. The Muslim scholars establish their decisions by addressing five foundations of Islamic law i.e. “maqāṣid al sharı̄`a”; the purposes of the law. These are dın̄, nafs, nasl, `aql and māl. To achieve this, the five principles should all be met before approval of an experiment like the Chinese embryo modifications; Qaṣd which is achieved in this case as it aims to protect the embryo from HIV. Yaqın̄ and Ḍarar were not satisfied as they require strong scientific certainty of the procedures, and evidence of safety. Ḍarūra by which the alternatives being compared; in this case more established and proven safe alternatives to protect the HIV transmission from the father are available, so this principle is not met. The final principle is `Urf, by which the social context of using any contemporary technology should be taken in consideration, and clearly this was not achieved. Collectively, germline changes are rejected from an Islamic perspective until the five principles are fulfilled. In the Chinese Twins gene editing case, there was clearly no justification or support for it according to the Muslim Jurisprudence laws. These laws and approaches can serve as an ethical checklist for such controversial research, especially in early stages of the research. (shrink)

The responses to the questions of why? when?, how?, where?, and in what ways? business ethics should be taught in the BusinessEthics classroom inundate the scholarly literature. Yet, to date, despite some very interesting ideas, with respect to the answers givento the above question, not only has nothing even close to consensus been reached, but this particular area of pedagogy is instagnation—authors still challenge both the very idea of teaching business ethics as well as the practical value of such courses (...) for ourstudents once they graduate to the corporate world.In this paper I will suggest that the reason for this lack of pedagogical progress is that there has been a serious oversight regarding the most important teaching question of all: Who? I will show that the pedagogical issue of whom should be teaching Business Ethics has been largely ignored, skirted or answered incorrectly. I will then boldly argue that the only necessary condition for successful courses inBusiness Ethics is that they be taught by experts in ethics, i.e., Ph.D.s in philosophy. (shrink)

The responses to the questions of why? when?, how?, where?, and in what ways? business ethics should be taught in the BusinessEthics classroom inundate the scholarly literature. Yet, to date, despite some very interesting ideas, with respect to the answers givento the above question, not only has nothing even close to consensus been reached, but this particular area of pedagogy is instagnation—authors still challenge both the very idea of teaching business ethics as well as the practical value of such courses (...) for ourstudents once they graduate to the corporate world.In this paper I will suggest that the reason for this lack of pedagogical progress is that there has been a serious oversight regarding the most important teaching question of all: Who? I will show that the pedagogical issue of whom should be teaching Business Ethics has been largely ignored, skirted or answered incorrectly. I will then boldly argue that the only necessary condition for successful courses inBusiness Ethics is that they be taught by experts in ethics, i.e., Ph.D.s in philosophy. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

Our primary aim in this paper is to sketch the account of virtue that we think most amenable to virtue measurement. Our account integrates Whole Trait Theory from psychology with a broadly neo-Aristotelian approach to virtue. Our account is ‘ecumenical’ in that it has appeal for a wide range of virtue ethicists. According to WTT, a personality trait is composed of a set of situation-specific trait-appropriate responses, which are produced when certain “social-cognitive” mechanisms are triggered by the perception of trait-relevant (...) stimuli in a person’s external and/or internal environment. Moving from this starting point, we discuss our conception of a virtue and respects in which it both aligns with and diverges from Aristotle’s conception. We discuss roles for practical wisdom and motivation in our conception of virtue, and highlight respects in which WTT provides an amenable empirical framework into which key Aristotelian elements can be integrated. We conclude with brief remarks about our conception as an empirically adequate and measurable account. (shrink)

Our primary aim in this paper is to sketch the account of virtue that we think most amenable to virtue measurement. Our account integrates Whole Trait Theory from psychology with a broadly neo-Aristotelian approach to virtue. Our account is ‘ecumenical’ in that it has appeal for a wide range of virtue ethicists. According to WTT, a personality trait is composed of a set of situation-specific trait-appropriate responses, which are produced when certain “social-cognitive” mechanisms are triggered by the perception of trait-relevant (...) stimuli in a person’s external and/or internal environment. Moving from this starting point, we discuss our conception of a virtue and respects in which it both aligns with and diverges from Aristotle’s conception. We discuss roles for practical wisdom and motivation in our conception of virtue, and highlight respects in which WTT provides an amenable empirical framework into which key Aristotelian elements can be integrated. We conclude with brief remarks about our conception as an empirically adequate and measurable account. (shrink)

Our primary aim in this paper is to sketch the account of virtue that we think most amenable to virtue measurement. Our account integrates Whole Trait Theory from psychology with a broadly neo-Aristotelian approach to virtue. Our account is ‘ecumenical’ in that it has appeal for a wide range of virtue ethicists. According to WTT, a personality trait is composed of a set of situation-specific trait-appropriate responses, which are produced when certain “social-cognitive” mechanisms are triggered by the perception of trait-relevant (...) stimuli in a person’s external and/or internal environment. Moving from this starting point, we discuss our conception of a virtue and respects in which it both aligns with and diverges from Aristotle’s conception. We discuss roles for practical wisdom and motivation in our conception of virtue, and highlight respects in which WTT provides an amenable empirical framework into which key Aristotelian elements can be integrated. We conclude with brief remarks about our conception as an empirically adequate and measurable account. (shrink)

Our primary aim in this paper is to sketch the account of virtue that we think most amenable to virtue measurement. Our account integrates Whole Trait Theory from psychology with a broadly neo-Aristotelian approach to virtue. Our account is ‘ecumenical’ in that it has appeal for a wide range of virtue ethicists. According to WTT, a personality trait is composed of a set of situation-specific trait-appropriate responses, which are produced when certain “social-cognitive” mechanisms are triggered by the perception of trait-relevant (...) stimuli in a person’s external and/or internal environment. Moving from this starting point, we discuss our conception of a virtue and respects in which it both aligns with and diverges from Aristotle’s conception. We discuss roles for practical wisdom and motivation in our conception of virtue, and highlight respects in which WTT provides an amenable empirical framework into which key Aristotelian elements can be integrated. We conclude with brief remarks about our conception as an empirically adequate and measurable account. (shrink)

Volume 34, Issue 8, December 2020, Page 1632-1645.

The lead article in this January‐February 2021 issue—the first of the Hastings Center Report's fiftieth year of publication—does not set out to change medicine. It tries instead to understand it. In “A Heart without Life: Artificial Organs and the Lived Body,” Mary Jean Walker draws on work in phenomenology and on empirical research with people who have received artificial heart devices to argue that such devices may have two very different effects on how a patient experiences the body and the (...) self. Several other pieces in this issue address the ongoing slew of patient care and health policy problems surrounding the Covid‐19 pandemic, and a special report titled Democracy in Crisis: Civic Learning and the Reconstruction of Common Purpose considers the requirements for public involvement in policy‐making about bioethical issues. (shrink)

Increasingly, scholarship on moral injury is expanding to include non‐military personnel, and considers a violation of bodily integrity—for example, of civilian women who are targeted for sexual violence in warfare—as a particularly egregious harm. Moral injury discourse also extends beyond the individual to the social context in which moral injury arises, its relational effects, and its utterly devastating impact on personhood, an impact frequently characterized as a “soul wound.” The intersection of genocidal rape—both as an individual and a group harm—with (...) religion, as facilitating moral injury and restorative “soul repair,” exemplifies these trends. Although moral injury research rarely addresses the detrimental influences of religion or references the “soul” with precision, the discourse of moral injury does provide an opportunity for exploring the relationship between personhood and agency from the perspectives of those who inflict and are subjected to harm. (shrink)

Soeurs ennemies ou soeurs jumelles, servante et maîtresse ou compagnes de labeur, s'ignorant l'une l'autre ou unies au point de presque s'identifier, la foi et la raison entretiennent à l'évidence une relation intense et tumultueuse. N'est-ce pas justement au coeur du mouvement qui tantôt les rapproche tantôt les oppose que s'ajuste leur rapport? Plus que d'un état stable acquis une fois pour toutes il s'agit bien d'une dynamique, d'un processus. C'est cc que visent à montrer les essais réunis dans cc (...) livre, qui rassemble les fruits d'un colloque de théologie et de philosophie tenu à l'initiative du Studium de Philosophie de Chartres et de l'Institut de Théologie des Dombes, centres de formation de la Communauté du Chemin Neuf. (shrink)

Speakers often overspecify by encoding more information than is necessary when referring to an object (e.g., “the blue mug” for the only mug in a group of objects). We investigated the role of a partner's linguistic behavior (whether or not they overspecify) on a speaker's own tendency to overspecify. We used a director–matcher task in which speakers interacted with a partner who either consistently overspecified or minimally specified in the color/size dimension (Experiments 1, 2, and 3), as well as with (...) a partner who switched behaviors midway through interaction (Experiments 4 and 5). We found that speakers aligned with their partner's linguistic behavior to produce overspecific or minimally specific descriptions, and we saw little evidence that the alignment was enhanced by lexical or semantic repetition across prime and target trials. Time‐course analyses showed that alignment increased over the course of the interaction, and speakers appeared to track a change in the partner's linguistic behavior, altering their reference strategy to continue matching that of their partner's. These results demonstrate the persistent influence of a partner's behavior on speakers across the duration of an interaction. (shrink)

ABSTRACT One of the standard defenses of Daniel Tosh, Andrew Dice Clay, Bernard Manning, and other stand-up comedians who have been accused of crossing moral lines is that the responses they elicit belong to an aesthetic rather than a moral domain to which standard methods of ethical evaluation are therefore inapplicable. I argue, first, that fictionality does not confer immunity to ethical criticism and, second, that the stance adopted by the stand-up artist is not fully analogous to a fictive one (...) in any event. Whatever the case with respect to the adoption of an alternative persona, the stand-up artist refers in his or her pronouncements to the actual world in a way that a fiction does not. That also suggests susceptibility to ethical criticism, just for different reasons. (shrink)

In this paper, we pose a speculative encounter between Heidegger and the Chinese Song Dynasty landscape painter Xia Gui. Our intention is to reassess Heidegger’s theory of the fourfold. By placing the concept in a cross-cultural context, we argue that Heidegger was essentially correct in that the world is structured as a fold between interrelated elements. At the same time, we challenge the quantity and quality of the folded elements. If one turns to the work of Xia Gui in conjunction (...) with relevant Daoist texts, what one finds is a threefold structure to the world, composed of earth, sky, and mortals without Heidegger’s emphasis on divinities. In conclusion, we suggest that studying the folding structure of the world ought to be done through cultural comparisons of philosophical and aesthetic traditions in order to understand the potentiality for worldhood as an xfold. (shrink)

The periodic table can be simply demarcated into four classes of metal and four classes of nonmetal. Such a treatment has been obstructed by the traditional view of metalloids as in-between elements; understandable but needless boundary squabbles; and a group-by-group view of the reactive nonmetals. Setting aside these limiting notions reveals some interesting patterns and facilitates teaching and learning the periodic table.

Because corporate social responsibility (CSR) is potentially beneficial for companies, it is important to understand the factors that improve a company’s CSR practice. Scholars hypothesize that facilitating learning organization characteristics, which are divided in characteristics at the organizational and the operational level, may improve CSR implementation. These characteristics stimulate companies and their members to be critical, learn from the past, and embrace change, but there is limited empirical evidence of this approach. This study addresses this gap by surveying 280 CSR (...) professionals and performing bootstrap mediation analyses to test multiple hypotheses. Learning organization characteristics at the organizational level, play a key role in supporting CSR implementation: leadership for learning, system connection, and group learning show a direct relationship with CSR implementation. It is striking that the role of the learning organization characteristics at the operational level is only indirect; the organizational characteristics mediate their relationship with CSR implementation. (shrink)

In this paper we present a model of vocational education and training (VET) that can be used to guide decisions relating to VET in Africa today. This model takes the critique of the neoclassical, neoliberal model of VET as its starting point. Guided by Bhaskar's Critical Naturalism, we use immanent critique to consider the adequacy of proposed alternatives to the neoclassical approach, such as: the heterodox approach, which foregrounds explanations based on human capital and political economy; and Hodgson and Spours' (...) social ecosystem model, which addresses some of the limitations of the heterodox account by including, social and ecosystem elements. Finally, we offer a version of the social ecosystem model that, according to our analysis, explains more of the empirical evidence than previous models. Our version of the social ecosystem model differs from earlier versions in terms of its explicit reference to the critical realist ideas of position- practices and emergence. (shrink)

Presenta a grandes rasgos su tesis doctoral. Dentro del marco de la teoría de los afectos, Spinoza sostiene una tesis sobre la alienación a partir de la imaginación y del tiempo, para ello produce una teoría del tiempo y, fundamentalmente, una teoría de las intensidades que sirve para explicar la ilusión.

Little is known about how employees on husbandry farms perceive animal welfare and the factors influencing the relationship between them and the animals they engage with in their daily work. Reporting the findings of qualitative interviews with 23 employees on five Danish farms (mink, dairy and pig production), this paper describes how the employees viewed animal welfare, and discusses how they dealt with animal welfare issues in their daily work. Four distinct rationales for animal welfare were identified. 1) Animal welfare (...) was supported by concerns about production and health, and could be negotiated – especially when it came to the ability of the animals to perform natural behaviour. 2) Animal welfare was connected with the working conditions on the farm. 3) The employees’ views about animal welfare were affected by working conditions over which they had no influence. 4) An awareness of the condition of the animals was seen as obviously needed in relation to production, but a deeper attachment to some animals was also seen. A specific challenge is presented by the increasingly diverse workforce in farming, with one third of the employees on Danish farms coming from abroad. If farm owners are not able to integrate these employees, there is a risk of creating a second-tier of foreign workers who are isolated. Furthermore, it was seen that negative working conditions can be taken out on the animals, or that animal welfare can come to be seen as unimportant as compared with human welfare. (shrink)

Appeal to experience for rational justification of religious belief is probably as old as the question whether religious belief has any rational support. The issues relevant to such appeal range widely, and I will have to be content to deal with only a few of them.

Context: Phenomenology and the enactive approach pose a unique challenge to dream research: during sleep one seems to be relatively disconnected from both world and body. Movement and perception, prerequisites for sensorimotor subjectivity, are restricted; the dreamer’s experience is turned inwards. In cognitive neurosciences, on the other hand, the generally accepted approach holds that dream formation is a direct result of neural activations in the absence of perception, and dreaming is often equated with “delusions.” Problem: Can enactivism and phenomenology account (...) for the variety of dream experiences? What kinds of experiential and empirical approaches are required in order to probe into dreaming subjectivity? Investigating qualities of perception, sensation, and embodiment in dreams, as well as the relationship between the dream-world and waking-world requires a step away from a delusional or altered-state framework of dream formation and a step toward an enactive integrative approach. Method: In this article, we will focus on the “depth” of dream experiences, i.e., what is possible in the dream state. Our article is divided into two parts: a theoretical framework for approaching dreaming from an enactive cognition standpoint; and discussion of the role and strategies for experimentation on dreaming. Based on phenomenology and theories of enactivism, we will argue for the primacy of subjectivity and imagination in the formation of lived experience. Results: We propose that neurophenomenology of dreaming is a nascent discipline that requires rethinking the relative role of third-, first- and second-person methodologies, and that a paradigm shift is required in order to investigate dreaming as a phenomenon on a continuum of conscious phenomena as opposed to a break from or an alteration of consciousness. Implications: Dream science, as part of the larger enterprise of consciousness and subjectivity studies, can be included in the enactive framework. This implies that dream experiences are neither passively lived nor functionally disconnected from dreamers’ world and body. We propose the basis and some concrete strategies for an empirical enactive neurophenomenology of dreaming. We conclude that investigating dream experiences can illuminate qualities of subjective perception and relation to the world, and thus challenge the traditional subject-object juxtaposition. Constructivist content: This article argues for an interdisciplinary enactive cognitive science approach to dream studies. (shrink)

Selected articles of Ēṭukūru Balarāmamūrti on Marxist philosophy; includes contributed on his life and work.