Online education lacks the moral and ethical engagement as well as the empathic interactions that are essential and integral to true liberal education, including business. While the online venue can provide useful information and put libraries at the hands of the student or employee, there is an implicit lack of focus on the sacredness and centrality of the person, his or her values, attitudes, needs, and expectations. The focus of online education is on the delivery of data, not the student’s (...) engagement with the material or the process. Critically absent from online education is the ability to explore the transformation of data as it changes, first to information, then to knowledge, and finally to wisdom, within each person. Finally, absent is the ability to raise the level of abstraction. Since all needs to be measurable in concrete terms in online education, we are left with the language of metrics, such as deliverables, outcomes, inputs, and outputs. Where is the person in all of this? Where is the focus on the moral compass that is so necessary in any type of education? (shrink)

The recent global economic collapse brings new calls for reform and change as well as a re-examination of the ethical foundations underpining it. Most professors as well as students remain profoundly unhappy with the Business Curricula. The curricula appear to swing between technological training and academic theory. There is little genuine focus on the central issue of the problem: the students’ and faculty’s assumptive world which drives the selection of the materials chosen for presentation as well as the decision-making process. (...) In the pragmatic quest to achieve status within academe, business schools appear to have forgotten that their subject matter is not one cognate domain but a mixture of several areas including mathematics, economics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, logic and planning. Course structures must be redesigned as consilient. That is, each course contains in it the links to other courses and is not expected to be complete in themselves; the new structures proposed are no longer under the direct control of one instructor but each course is under the control of a committee. This creates a linkage between courses that together from a linked chain of knowledge where the strength of the curriculum is tied to the consilient strength of the courses. The result is an organic and developmental model for teaching and learning with a strong ethical foundation as well as developed moral links to effective decision making. (shrink)

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. Accordingly, we initiated the (...) development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology in early 2020. -/- As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. CIDO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology and Viral Infectious Disease Ontology. CIDO has imported terms from over 30 OBO ontologies. For example, CIDO imports all SARS-CoV-2 protein terms from the Protein Ontology, COVID-19-related phenotype terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, and over 100 COVID-19 terms for vaccines (both authorized and in clinical trial) from the Vaccine Ontology. CIDO systematically represents variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and over 300 amino acid substitutions therein, along with over 300 diagnostic kits and methods. CIDO also describes hundreds of host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and the drugs that target proteins in these PPIs. CIDO has been used to model COVID-19 related phenomena in areas such as epidemiology. The scope of CIDO was evaluated by visual analysis supported by a summarization network method. CIDO has been used in various applications such as term standardization, inference, natural language processing (NLP) and clinical data integration. We have applied the amino acid variant knowledge present in CIDO to analyze differences between SARS-CoV-2 Delta and Omicron variants. CIDO's integrative host-coronavirus PPIs and drug-target knowledge has also been used to support drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. -/- CIDO represents entities and relations in the domain of coronavirus diseases with a special focus on COVID-19. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and has been used in a range of applications. (shrink)

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the (...) OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

The matter which I wish to discuss is a discrepancy between two accounts of the origin of the philosopher in the myth of Plato's Phaedrus. Before their incarnation the souls of all humans are imagined as having enjoyed the vision of reality, but not all in the same company or to the same degree. For, in the first place, the souls are distributed among the companies that severally follow eleven different gods, 247 a-b, a distribution which is regarded as important (...) for the type of character an embodied soul will subsequently have, 252d. In the second place, some souls are more successful than others in following their god, and accordingly they manage to see more of reality than do the others, and on this variation depends the sort of life each soul will subsequently have on earth, 248 d-e. And here arises the problem about the philosopher, corresponding to the two differences of company and degree in the soul's pre-natal vision of reality. (shrink)

The matter which I wish to discuss is a discrepancy between two accounts of the origin of the philosopher in the myth of Plato's Phaedrus. Before their incarnation the souls of all humans are imagined as having enjoyed the vision of reality, but not all in the same company or to the same degree. For, in the first place, the souls are distributed among the companies that severally follow eleven different gods, 247 a-b, a distribution which is regarded as important (...) for the type of character an embodied soul will subsequently have, 252d. In the second place, some souls are more successful than others in following their god, and accordingly they manage to see more of reality than do the others, and on this variation depends the sort of life each soul will subsequently have on earth, 248 d-e. And here arises the problem about the philosopher, corresponding to the two differences of company and degree in the soul's pre-natal vision of reality. (shrink)

In this study, we propose and test a model of the effects of organizational ethical culture and organizational architecture on the perceived unethical behavior of employees towards customers. This study also examines the relationship between organizational ethical culture and moral acceptability judgment, hypothesizing that moral acceptability judgment is an important stage in the ethical decision-making process. Based on a field study in one of the largest financial institutions in Europe, we found that organizational ethical culture was significantly related to the (...) perceived frequency of unethical behavior towards customers and to the moral acceptability judgment of this type of unethical behavior. No support was found for the claim that features of organizational architecture are associated with the perceived frequency of unethical behavior towards customers. This is the first study to document the differential effects of organizational architecture and organizational ethical culture on perceived unethical behavior of employees towards customers, in wholesale banking. Implications for managers and future research are discussed. (shrink)

This paper examines the perceived ethical values of Malaysian managers. It is based on the opinions of 15 hypothetical ethical/unethical business situations from the 81 managers who agreed to participate in the survey. The findings of this study showed that these Malaysian managers have high ethical values. However 53% of the respondents believed that the ethical standards of today are lower than that of 15 years ago. Apparently, this is related to the existence of many unethical business practices prevalent in (...) the modern business world. The behavior of one's immediate superior is the most important factor in influencing managers to commit unethical practices. The results also indicate only a slight variation among the managers in terms of perceived ethical values by virtue of job position, job specialization, type of business activity or the size of the business organization. (shrink)

During the past few years considerable debate has arisen within academic journals with respect to the use of smart drugs or cognitive enhancement pharmaceuticals. The following paper seeks to examine the foundations of this cognitive enhancement debate using the example of methylphenidate use among college students. The argument taken is that much of the enhancement debate rests upon inflated assumptions about the ability of such drugs to enhance and over-estimations of either the size of the current market for such drugs (...) or the rise in popularity as drugs for enhancing cognitive abilities. This article provides an overview of the empirical evidence that methylphenidate has the ability to significantly improve cognitive abilities in healthy individuals, and examines whether the presumed uptake of the drug is either as socially significant as implied or growing to the extent that it requires urgent regulatory attention. In addition, it reviews the evidence of side-effects for the use of methylphenidate which may be an influential factor in whether an individual decides to use such drugs. The primary conclusions are that neither drug efficacy, nor the benefit-to-risk balance, nor indicators of current or growing demand provide sufficient evidence that methylphenidate is a suitable example of a cognitive enhancer with mass appeal. In light of these empirically based conclusions, the article discusses why methylphenidate might have become seen as a smart drug or cognitive enhancer. (shrink)

Robots are now associated with various aspects of our lives. These sophisticated machines have been increasingly used in different manufacturing industries and services sectors for decades. During this time, they have been a factor in causing significant harm to humans, prompting questions of liability. Industrial robots are presently regarded as products for liability purposes. In contrast, some commentators have proposed that robots be granted legal personality, with an overarching aim of exonerating the respective creators and users of these artefacts from (...) liability. This article is concerned mainly with industrial robots that exercise some degree of self-control as programmed, though the creation of fully autonomous robots is still a long way off. The proponents of the robot’s personality compare these machines generally with corporations, and sporadically with, inter alia, animals, and idols, in substantiating their arguments. This article discusses the attributes of legal personhood and the justifications for the separate personality of corporations and idols. It then demonstrates the reasons for refusal of an animal’s personality. It concludes that robots are ineligible to be persons, based on the requirements of personhood. (shrink)

Traditional Chinese commentators rightly see that understanding Zhuangzi's way with words is the presupposition for understanding Zhuangzi at all. They are not sure, however, if Zhuangzi's words are super-effective or pure nonsense. I consider Zhuangzi's experience with language, and then turn to Heidegger's word of being to see if it may throw light on Zhuangzi's way of saying. I argue that a conversation between Heidegger and Zhuangzi on language is possible, but only by expanding Heidegger's notion of Gestell (enframing) and (...) through a destruction of the dominant Confucian discourse that obscures Zhuangzi's way of saying. (shrink)

M. J. Dewar argues that in Georg. 1.511–4 Virgil may have been drawing a disquieting parallel between Orestes, evoked through an imitation of Aeschylus , and Octavian, present a few lines above . Pausanias probably supports this suggestion; he shows that the link Octavian-Orestes existed quite early and in a sense favourable to Octavian, even though it may soon have been used in a negative sense by anti-Caesarian propaganda on account of the dark side of the myth. In front of (...) the temple of Hera in Argos there was still visible in the second century a statue representing Orestes, but identified by the inscription as Augustus. Certainly this parallel Augustus-Orestes was not proposed-and preserved - with polemical purpose in a famous sanctuary and in the Augustan age. Given the resemblance between history and myth and the moral weight of the famous myth itself, it is unlikely that we have to do with the mere re-use of any old statue. (shrink)

Bilim felsefesinin en temel problemlerinden biri olan sınırlandırma problemi belirli bir ölçüt vasıtası ile bilimi, bilimsel olmayan ya da sahte/sözde bilim olan etkinliklerden ayırt edip edemeyeceğimizi konu edinmektedir. Literatüre baktığımızda felsefeciler –özellikle bilim felsefecileri– bilimin doğasını karakterize etme girişiminde bulunurken bilim dilinin mantıksal yapısına ya da bilimin tarihsel süreçlerine odaklanarak, bilimi bilimsel olmayan ya da sahte-bilim olan etkinliklerden ayırt etmişlerdir. Bu çalışma ise farklı bir yaklaşım benimseyerek sınırlandırma problemine, felsefecilerin değil, bilim insanlarının perspektifi ile bakmayı amaçlamaktadır. Bu sebeple alanında deneyimli (...) ve çeşitli bilim dallarında profesör olan otuz bilim insanı ile niteliksel araştırma yöntemlerinden biri olan yapılandırılmış görüşme tekniği uygulanmıştır. Bu görüşmeler aracılığıyla bilim insanlarının sınırlandırma problemi hususunda öne sürdükleri görüşler açığa çıkartılıp değerlendirilmiştir. Değerlendirme neticesinde üç temel bulguya ulaşılmıştır. İlki, sınırlandırma problemine ilişkin sorularımıza bilim insanları tarafından getirilen yanıtların birçoğu temel felsefi yaklaşımlarla uyuşmaktadır. Elde ettiğimiz verileri farklı temalar altında analiz ettiğimiz bu çalışmada, sınırlandırma problemine dair yaygın felsefi görüşlerin, bilim insanlarının görüşleri ile anlamlı benzerlikler taşıdığı kısımlar vurgulanmıştır. İkincisi, sınırlandırma problemi ve bu problemlerle ilişkili diğer meseleler üzerinde felsefi olarak sağlanamayan uzlaşma, bilim insanları arasında da mevcuttur. Ne var ki bu ihtilaf dengeli bir biçimdedir, öyle ki benzer yanıtlara sahip olan bilim insanları baskın bir grup sayısına ulaşmamıştır. Üçüncü ve son olarak, bilim insanlarının bilim felsefesinin temel problemlerine yüksek oranda yabancı olduğu görülmektedir. Bu bulgu, her ne kadar nicel olmayan bir yolla ölçülmüşse de verilerin dikkatli analizi durumun bu yönde olduğunu göstermektedir. Tüm bu temel bulgular ışığında, genel değerlendirmemiz, farklı türden yapılandırılmış görüşmelerin çok daha detaylı sonuçlar temin edebileceğidir. (shrink)

Medical-legal partnerships connect legal advocates to healthcare providers and settings. Maintaining effectiveness of medical-legal partnerships and consistently identifying opportunities for innovation and adaptation takes intentionality and effort. In this paper, we discuss ways in which our use of data and quality improvement methods have facilitated advocacy at both patient (client) and population levels as we collectively pursue better, more equitable outcomes.

In this article, we present results from a literature review of intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values of nature conducted for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, as part of the Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuations of Nature. We identify the most frequently recurring meanings in the heterogeneous use of different value types and their association with worldviews and other key concepts. From frequent uses, we determine a core meaning for each value type, which is (...) sufficiently inclusive to serve as an umbrella over different understandings in the literature and specific enough to help highlight its difference from the other types of values. Finally, we discuss convergences, overlapping areas, and fuzzy boundaries between different value types to facilitate dialogue, reduce misunderstandings, and improve the methods for valuation of nature's contributions to people, including ecosystem services, to inform policy and direct future research. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. (shrink)

The article argues that Kant’s argument for ownership entails a standard of meaningful use by which property regimes can be evaluated: a regime must make it possible for usable objects to be meaningfully used. A particular form of fully communal ownership can satisfy this standard. Further, this form of communal ownership is compatible with Kantian freedom more broadly. I conclude that, if this is so, there is a great deal of space for further consideration of the rightfulness of diverse regimes (...) of ownership and exchange within a Kantian framework. (shrink)

While there are many points of opposition between the political philosophies of Marx and Kant, the two can greatly benefit from one another in various ways. Bringing the ideas of Marx and Kant together offers a promising way forward for each view. Most significantly, a powerful critique of capitalism can be developed from their combined thought: Kant’s political philosophy offers a robust idea of freedom to ground this critique, while Marx provides the nuanced understanding of social and political power structures (...) under capitalism that allows this idea of freedom to be properly applied. (shrink)

Critiquing any practice, theory, or law, requires understanding the characteristics of the environment which created a need for this law. There are hundreds of different cultures in the world, and each one has its own set of norms, characteristics, and values. What in one country is perceived normal, ethical or unethical, right or wrong, may not be the same somewhere else in the world. The first civilizations begun in Africa and Europe many thousands of years ago when people were hunters (...) and nomads, it is not unreasonable to suspect that many of those traits and characteristics have been socially transferred and/or inherited by future generations. (shrink)

The article considers Max Weber’s model of plebiscitary leadership and historical examples of plebiscitary democracy. It is argued that there is no clear distinction between plebiscitary democracy and dictatorship inWeber’s writings. As Stefan Breuer demonstrates, such a distinction allows us to broaden the application of Weberian concepts. Plebiscitary elements can be seen in the political life of non-Western states, which have been discussed from the multiple modernities perspective. However, while that perspective develops the Weberian sociological tradition, its representatives mostly do (...) not use the concept of plebiscitary leadership. Thus, Shmuel Eisenstadt draws primarily on Weber’s sociology of religion in his analysis of different types of modernity. Specifically, Eisenstadt considers the impact of civilizational legacies on political processes in India and Latin America. Peter Wagner discusses the relevance of Weber’s rationalization thesis and theory of capitalism rather than the concepts of Weberian political sociology. In his study of democratization in Brazil and South Africa, Wagner emphasizes the progressive character of political changes but does not consider the possibility of a reversal of these processes. The article argues that the contemporary reconstruction of Weber’s model of plebiscitary leadership can complement the analyses of democratization in non-Western societies from the multiple modernities perspective. (shrink)

Developing an intellectualist account of skill, Stanley and Williamson define skill as a kind of disposition to action-guiding knowledge. The present paper challenges their definition of skill. While we don’t dispute that skill may consist of a cognitive, a dispositional, and an action-guiding component, we argue that Stanley and Williamson’s account of each component is problematic. In the first section, we argue, against Stanley and Williamson, that the cognitive component of skill is not a case of propositional knowledge-wh, which is (...) typically indexical. In the second section, we seek to show that Stanley and Williamson face difficulties in arguing for a generic claim about skill as a kind of disposition, and they fail to defend intellectualism about skill based on the dispositional account. In the third section we argue that Stanley and Williamson need a more detailed account of the action-guiding aspect of skill to avoid several difficulties, including a threat of a regress. We close with some lessons for the debate over intellectualism and anti-intellectualism about skill. (shrink)

[full article, abstract in English; abstract in Lithuanian] Armstrong’s theory of laws and causation may be articulated as something like the following, which we may refer to as the received view: “Laws are intrinsic higher-order relations of ensuring between properties. The instantiation of laws is identical with singular causation. This identity is a posteriori.” Opponents and advocates of this view, believe that it may fairly and correctly be attributed to Armstrong. I do not deny it; instead I seek to reconsider (...) the received view, specifically by treating it as a part of Armstrong’s metaphysics. The main features that should concern us are truthmaker theory and the formal account of the constitutive parts of states of affairs. I also discuss Bird’s ultimate argument against Armstrong and show how its impact is weakened by this proper reading. (shrink)

This book discusses how rational choice theory grew out of RAND's work for the US Air Force. It concentrates on the work of William J. Riker, Kenneth J. Arrow, James M. Buchanan, Russel Hardin, and John Rawls. It argues that within the context of the US Cold War with its intensive anti-communist and anti-collectivist sentiment, the foundations of capitalist democracy were grounded in the hyper individualist theory of non-cooperative games.

The Greek original of Galen's is lost, nor has a copy of the complete translation into Arabic, made by Hunayn b. Ishāq in the first half of the ninth century, come down to us, though some passages of it are quoted by various Arab authors. A summary of the translation, however, was discovered by P. Kraus in a miscellaneous manuscript in Cairo and published by him in the Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Egypt, vol. v/i.

The attitudes of women patients with cancer were explored when they were invited to participate in one of three randomised trials that included chemotherapy at two university centres and a satellite centre. Fourteen patients participating in and 15 patients declining trials were interviewed. Analysis was based on the constant comparative method. Most patients voiced positive attitudes towards clinical research, believing that trials are necessary for further medical development, and most spontaneously argued that participation is a moral obligation. Most trial decliners, (...) however, described a radical change in focus as they faced the actual personal choice. Almost no one got an impression of clinical equipoise between treatments in the trials, and most patients expressed discomfort with randomisation. A patient’s choice to participate was mainly determined by whether the primary focus was on treatment effect or on adverse effects. Both knowledge about and feelings towards trials originated mostly from the media, although paradoxically the media were largely seen as untrustworthy. Mistrust was shown towards the pharmaceutical industry, and although most patients originally trusted that doctors primarily pursued the interest of patients, they did not trust the adequacy of doctors or industry in maintaining self-regulation. Thus, public control measures were judged to be essential. (shrink)

This article compares James M. Buchanan's and John Rawls's theories of democratic governance. In particular it compares their positions on the characteristics of a legitimate social contract. Where Buchanan argues that additional police force can be used to quell political demonstrations, Rawls argues for a social contract that meets the difference principle.

The Greek original of Galen's is lost, nor has a copy of the complete translation into Arabic, made by Hunayn b. Ishāq in the first half of the ninth century, come down to us, though some passages of it are quoted by various Arab authors. A summary of the translation, however, was discovered by P. Kraus in a miscellaneous manuscript in Cairo and published by him in the Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Egypt, vol. v/i.