Iris Marion Young’s influential Social Connections Model of responsibility offers a compelling approach to theorizing structural injustice. However, the precise nature of the kind of responsibility modelled by the SCM, along with its relationship to the liability model, has remained unclear. I offer a reading of Young that takes the difference between the liability model and the SCM to be an instance of a more longstanding distinction in the literature on moral responsibility: attributability vs. accountability. I show that interpreting the (...) SCM as a conception of accountability resolves a number of objections, while also highlighting the SCM’s distinctive stance on the relationship between ethics and politics. (shrink)

Most discussions of racial fetish center on the question of whether it is caused by negative racial stereotypes. In this paper I adopt a different strategy, one that begins with the experiences of those targeted by racial fetish rather than those who possess it; that is, I shift focus away from the origins of racial fetishes to their effects as a social phenomenon in a racially stratified world. I examine the case of preferences for Asian women, also known as ‘yellow (...) fever’, to argue against the claim that racial fetishes are unobjectionable if they are merely based on personal or aesthetic preference rather than racial stereotypes. I contend that even if this were so, yellow fever would still be morally objectionable because of the disproportionate psychological burdens it places on Asian and Asian-American women, along with the role it plays in a pernicious system of racial social meanings. (shrink)

What responsibility do individuals bear for structural injustice? Iris Marion Young has offered the most fully developed account to date, the Social Connections Model. She argues that we all bear responsibility because we each causally contribute to structural processes that produce injustice. My aim in this article is to motivate and defend an alternative account that improves on Young’s model by addressing five fundamental challenges faced by any such theory. The core idea of what I call the “Role-Ideal Model” is (...) that we are each responsible for structural injustice through and in virtue of our social roles, i.e. our roles as parents, colleagues, employers, citizens, etc., because roles are the site where structure meets agency. In short, the Role-Ideal Model explains how individual action contributes to structural change, justifies demands for action from each particular agent, specifies what kinds of acts should be undertaken, moderates between demanding too much and too little of individual agents, and provides an account of the critical responses appropriate for holding individuals accountable for structural injustice. (shrink)

This article theoretically proposes and empirically verifies an understudied issue in the business ethics and corporate social responsibility literature—how moral degradation in a society influences the relationship between BE or CSR and firm performance. Building on strategic choice theory, we propose that both BE and CSR become more important in enhancing business success when the perceived MD is heightened. Our analysis of 300 firms operating in China statistically confirms our hypotheses: first, under high MD, firms’ engagement in CSR results in (...) higher corporate legitimacy and competitive advantage, and second, their adherence to ethical business codes leads to higher corporate legitimacy. We conclude the article by outlining the implications for both theory and practice. (shrink)

Question order effects are commonly observed in self-report measures of judgment and attitude. This article develops a quantum question order model (the QQ model) to account for four types of question order effects observed in literature. First, the postulates of the QQ model are presented. Second, an a priori, parameter-free, and precise prediction, called the QQ equality, is derived from these mathematical principles, and six empirical data sets are used to test the prediction. Third, a new index is derived from (...) the model to measure similarity between questions. Fourth, we show that in contrast to the QQ model, Bayesian and Markov models do not generally satisfy the QQ equality and thus cannot account for the reported empirical data that support this equality. Finally, we describe the conditions under which order effects are predicted to occur, and we review a broader range of findings that are encompassed by these very same quantum principles. We conclude that quantum probability theory, initially invented to explain order effects on measurements in physics, appears to be a powerful natural explanation for order effects of self-report measures in social and behavioral sciences, too. (shrink)

This chapter distinguishes between two concepts of moral responsibility. We are responsible for our actions in the first sense only when those actions reflect our identities as moral agents, i.e. when they are attributable to us. We are responsible in the second sense when it is appropriate for others to enforce certain expectations and demands on those actions, i.e. to hold us accountable for them. This distinction allows for an account of moral responsibility for implicit bias, defended here, on which (...) people may lack attributability for actions caused by implicit bias but are still accountable for them. What this amounts to is leaving aside appraisal-based forms of moral criticism such as blame and punishment in favor of non-appraising forms of accountability. This account not only does more justice to our moral experience and agency, but will also lead to more effective practices for combating the harms of implicit bias. (shrink)

This paper is part of an attempt to clarify the relationship between explanatory reasons and justificatory reasons for actions of various kinds. It draws on a distinction between two notions of rationalization, viz., ex ante and ex post rationalization, to recast the akratic case on the one hand and to explicate an adequate sense in which an explanatory but non-justificatory reason for an action rationalizes the latter on the other hand. The explication is helped by analysis of a hypothetical example, (...) and the name "quasi-rational" is legitimated for the type of actions this example represents. Last, but not least, the paper demonstrates that an implication of the argument is the falsity of one well-known principle in Davidson's action theory, i.e., the principle claiming that the (primary) reason for an action is also its cause. (shrink)

The importance of the connotation theory in Ockham’s semantics and metaphysics can hardly be overstated---it is the main mechanism that brings forth Ockham’s famous ontological elimination. Yet none of the extant interpretations can satisfactorily accommodate three widely accepted theses: (1) there is no synonym in mental language; (2) a connotative term has a semantically equivalent nominal definition; and (3) there are simple connotative terms in Ockham’s mental language. In this paper I offer an interpretation that I argue can accommodate all.

Sally Haslanger has recently argued that philosophical focus on implicit bias is overly individualist, since social inequalities are best explained in terms of social structures rather than the actions and attitudes of individuals. I argue that questions of individual responsibility and implicit bias, properly understood, do constitute an important part of addressing structural injustice, and I propose an alternative conception of social structure according to which implicit biases are themselves best understood as a special type of structure.

The virtual brand community has become an important marketing tool for companies. A successful brand community marketing strategy should attract a large number of consumers. Although past studies have revealed consumer motivations for participating in virtual brand communities, they fail to answer an important question: Why is it so easy for some virtual brand communities to attract users while others have such difficulty? In this study, product characteristics are hypothesized to be important factors that determine consumer motivation to participate in (...) brand communities. Product characteristics can directly affect how actively consumers participate in brand communities. The results of questionnaires show that product complexity, product symbolism, and product satisfaction have a positive influence on consumers’ willingness to participate in brand communities. Notably, the duration of product use has a regulating effect on the influence of product satisfaction and product symbolism. A long period of product use weakens the influence of product satisfaction on consumers’ willingness to participate in brand communities. On the contrary, a long period of product use strengthens the influence of product symbolism on consumers’ willingness to participate in brand communities. This study enriches the literature on brand community participation and has implications for companies that aim to utilize brand communities for marketing. (shrink)

A real number x is computable iff it is the limit of an effectively converging computable sequence of rational numbers, and x is left computable iff it is the supremum of a computable sequence of rational numbers. By applying the operations “sup” and “inf” alternately n times to computable sequences of rational numbers we introduce a non-collapsing hierarchy {Σn, Πn, Δn : n ∈ ℕ} of real numbers. We characterize the classes Σ2, Π2 and Δ2 in various ways and give (...) several interesting examples. (shrink)

Recent research has uncovered the dark side of creativity by finding that creative individuals are more likely to engage in unethical behavior. However, we argue that not all creative individuals make trouble. Using moral self-regulation theory as our overarching theoretical framework, we examine individuals’ moral identity as a boundary condition and moral disengagement as a mediating mechanism to explain when and how individual creativity is associated with workplace deviant behavior. We conducted two field studies using multi-source data to test our (...) hypotheses. In Study 1, the results indicated that creativity positively predicted moral disengagement for those low in moral identity. In Study 2 with multi-wave data, we replicated the finding that moral identity moderated the effect of creativity on moral disengagement in Study 1 and further revealed that moral disengagement mediated the interactive effects of creativity and moral identity on workplace deviant behavior. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Researchers have emphasized the value of authenticity, but not much is known about what makes a person authentic in the eyes of others. Our research takes an interpersonal perspective to examine the determinants of followers’ perceptions of leader authenticity. Building on social identity theory, we propose that two fundamental self-identifications–a leader’s sense of uniqueness and sense of belongingness–interact to influence followers’ perceptions of a leader’s authenticity via perceptions of a leader’s self-concept consistency. In a field study conducted among leader–follower dyads (...) and in a controlled laboratory experiment, we find that when a leader feels a low sense of belongingness, there is a positive relationship between a leader’s sense of uniqueness and perceptions of leader authenticity. When a leader feels a low sense of uniqueness, there is a positive relationship between a leader’s sense of belongingness and perceptions of leader authenticity. This is because followers perceive this leader as having high self-concept consistency. (shrink)

The green development level reflected in the green finance index and the evaluation of the degree of green development in smart cities have important practical effects on economic transformation. For promoting the transformation and upgrading of finance, we select 2013–2019 data and construct a distributed lag model to analyse the important role played by green finance and financial technology in the construction of smart cities. In the paper, we find green finance promotes the construction of smart cities, and only it (...) will not appear until nine months late. Financial technology has an opposite impact on the construction of smart cities, this is mainly because the research and marketization of financial technology are higher, and the cost is also higher. This influence will appear in the next 14 months. (shrink)

With the high frequency and intensity of worldwide disasters, cause-related marketing campaigns with sudden disasters are becoming increasingly popular. However, little is known about whether and how cause acuteness may influence consumer attitudes. This research aims to extend this research area through investigating the relationship between cause acuteness and consumer attitudes toward the product, as well as its underlying mechanism and boundary conditions. Based on a moral psychology perspective, we propose a theoretical model focusing on the mediating role of moral (...) elevation in influencing consumer attitudes. This model also incorporates product-cause fit and information transparency as moderators underpinning necessary conditions that are likely to lead to positive consumer attitudes. Four empirical studies were conducted to test our model. Our research results reveal that consumers have more positive attitudes toward the product associated with a sudden disaster than with an ongoing tragedy. Furthermore, the positive effect of cause acuteness on consumer attitudes is mediated by enhanced moral elevation, which occurs under the conditions of high product-cause fit and high information transparency. (shrink)

A real number is recursively approximable if there is a computable sequence of rational numbers converging to it. If some extra condition to the convergence is added, then the limit real number might have more effectivity. In this note we summarize some recent attempts to classify the recursively approximable real numbers by the convergence rates of the corresponding computable sequences ofr ational numbers.

Feminist philosophers have challenged a wide range of gender injustices in professional philosophy. However, the problem of precarity, that is, the increasing numbers of contingent faculty who cannot find permanent employment, has received scarcely any attention. What explains this oversight? In this article, I argue, first, that academics are held in the grips of an ideology that diverts attention away from the structural conditions of precarity, and second, that the gendered dimensions of such an ideology have been overlooked. To do (...) so, I identify two myths: the myth of meritocracy and the myth of work as its own reward. I demonstrate that these myths—and the two-tier system itself—manifest an unmistakably gendered logic, such that gender and precarity are mutually reinforcing and co-constitutive. I conclude that feminist philosophers have particular reason to organize against the casualization of academic work. (shrink)

Now that society is in a period of transition, the lack of norms for moral values is becoming an increasingly serious issue. People in commerce talk about commerce, and those "going out to sea" talk about the sea.

The research conducted in this article is aimed at analyzing color symbols in Russian, French and Chinese linguistic cultures using the analysis of phraseology and proverbs. The research methodology is based on a comparative analysis of phraseological units and proverbs containing color components in these languages. In the course of the study, both common and unique features in the color symbolism of each of the linguistic cultures under consideration were identified. Through a comparative analysis of phraseology and proverbs in different (...) languages, it was possible to better understand how color embodies cultural norms, worldview and historical contexts in each nation. This allowed us to see which aspects of color are particularly significant for each culture and what associations and symbolic meanings are associated with them. Special attention is paid to the analysis of differences and similarities in the interpretation of color in the idiomatic expressions of each language. This allows us to understand which cultural and historical factors form unique views and ideas about color in each of the linguistic cultures under consideration. The study also highlights that the interpretation of color symbols in idiomatic expressions depends on the cultural and historical contexts of each language. Idioms are a reflection of the collective consciousness and worldview of the people, and the study of color phenomena in idioms helps to better understand national identity and linguistic evolution. In addition, the study found that the red color can acquire different meanings and connotations in different languages, despite common dictionary definitions. This indicates that the use and attitude towards the color red depends on the cultural and historical characteristics of each language group. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that it combines linguistic analysis with the analysis of cultural characteristics and uses the methodology of synergetic symbolism. This approach allows us to understand how the interaction of different colors creates new symbolic meanings and associations specific to each culture. (shrink)

At present, customers’ low satisfaction and loyalty to city express service have restricted the development of city express. It is particularly important to analyze the factors causing customers’ low satisfaction and loyalty, which will promote the development of city express industry effectively. Based on SERVQUAL model and CCSI model, this paper constructs a new evaluation index system from the perspective of service quality. Through this new system, this paper first explores the factors that affect customers’ satisfaction and loyalty, respectively, by (...) fuzzy analytic hierarchy process and hierarchical regression analysis, taking the expected and perceived service quality as conversion variables. And then it analyzes the common factors that affect customers’ satisfaction and loyalty comprehensively. These two analyses will provide reference for solving the problem of low customer satisfaction and loyalty of city express enterprises. The results show that popularity and credibility, delivery time commitment, and mailing security are the common main factors affecting customer satisfaction and loyalty. Easy-to-understand receipts, the three-level index corresponding to the empathy dimension, is the most significant factor affecting customers’ loyalty in city express industry; Delivery time commitment, the three-level index corresponding to the reliability dimension, is the most significant factor affecting customers’ loyalty in city express industry. (shrink)

People disagree about the causes of social inequality and how to most effectively intervene in them. These may seem like empirical questions for social scientists, not philosophers. However, causal explanation itself depends on broadly normative commitments. From this it follows that (moral) philosophers have an important role to play in determining those causal explanations. I examine the case of causal explanations of poverty to demonstrate these claims. In short, philosophers who work to reshape our moral expectations also work, on the (...) back end, to restructure acceptable causal explanations—and hence solutions—for social inequality. Empirical and normative inquiry, then, are a two-way street. (shrink)