Directors rate integrity as having the greatest impact on successful Board performance. Yet, no shared meaning exists about what integrity means because it is dependent on one's personal values. This paper builds on research into integrity and top teams by investigating how integrity varies by director's personal values and implications for the Board agenda. It will explore how executives' and directors' definitions of integrity are based on their values, beliefs and underlying needs. Data from UK society was collected from 500 (...) UK adults, aged 18 and over. Results of the research found that definitions of integrity vary by ones value system. Implications include that what director's mean by integrity differs substantially from other employees with different values. Recommendations include re-focusing the Board agenda on issues that resonate with the director's personal values. A passionate Board requires integrity plus action; action without integrity equals indifference. (shrink)

Scandals, top management misbehaviour and company failures resulting in a loss of investment and public trust in companies is well documented. Why has this corporate governance crisis happened, will it continue and what are implications for the board? A theoretical and empirical approach is taken to understand the changing nature of values in society reflected in executives to reveal the cause of the recent corporate governance crisis and implications for the board. Data from executives was collected from 163 owner/managers, senior (...) managers and middle managers and combined with UK and US longitudinal population data. Results of the current research found empirical support for changing social values with the implication that the consensus of 'playing by the rules' has broken down and replaced by the need to outperform expectations even if that means bending or breaking the rules. This paper concludes with an action plan for the board agenda. (shrink)

What sorts of things are there in the world? Clearly enough, there are concrete, material things; but are there other things too, perhaps nonconcrete or non-material things? Some people believe that there are such things, which are often called abstract ; purported examples of such objects include numbers, properties, possible but non-actual states of affairs, propositions, and sets. Following a long-standing tradition, I shall describe persons who believe that there are abstract objects as ‘platonists’. In this paper, I shall not (...) directly address the plausibility of platonism, as compared with its rivals; instead, I shall confine my attention to one way in which some people have tried to combine platonism and theism. More specifically, I shall concentrate upon the claim that abstract objects depend upon God ontologically ; I shall argue that platonistic theists should reject DEP in favour of the claim that abstract objects exist independently of God . In order to evaluate the relative merits of DEP versus IND, it will be helpful to examine in some detail a particular articulation of DEP. When it comes to recent work on DEP, we can do no better in this regard than to examine the recent work of Thomas V. Morris and Christopher H. Menzel. According Morris and Menzel, there is a sense in which God literally creates such abstracta through engaging in intellective activities. (shrink)

A Scientific Approach The facts detailed in this briefing are the results of scientific exploration of terror networks and sacred values and their association to political violence. The research is sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

Toward the end of Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, Philo catalogues the ‘frivolous observances’, ‘rapturous ecstasies’ and ‘bigotted credulity’ of ‘vulgar superstition’, concluding that ‘true religion, I allow, has no such pernicious consequences: But we must treat of religion, as it has com monly been found in the world’. This would be a mild enough sort of caveat were it not nigh on impossible to determine exactly what counts as true religion, and how it figures in Hume's argument. Typically, answers (...) to this puzzle have required identifying the positions of the discussants, and then arguing that one of them represents Hume's views. A catalogue of the options may prove instructive. (shrink)

Rights of Women attracted much UK media attention in late 2014 by bringing a judicial review that challenged the reduced provisions for family law legal aid available for victims of domestic violence: R v The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice [2015] EWHC 35. In June 2015, within Rights of Women’s 40th anniversary year, Hannah Camplin interviewed the organisation’s Director Emma Scott about the decision to bring the judicial review, the advantages and challenges of the judicial review (...) process, and the experience of strategic litigation within the context of Rights of Women’s long history of campaigning for women’s rights. What emerged is a portrait of a feminist organisation in 2015, and, in a fast changing political and financial landscape, the dual importance of collaborative working and the need for flexibility in service provision and campaigning tools. (shrink)

Pop Art is one of the most prominent artistic movement of the Nineteenth century whose legacy is very influent also in this century. After a brief historical reconstruction of the origins of Pop Art in Great Britain and in the United State, the paper will offer a comparison between the Warholian way of interpreting Pop Art — a realistic way — the Lichtensteinian way, which is fantastic, and the personal interpretation offered by Ugo Nespolo whose Pop is fabulist and fabulous.

There are two ways to characterize symmetric relations. One is intensional: necessarily, Rxy iff Ryx. In some discussions of relations, however, what is important is whether or not a relation gives rise to the same completion of a given type (fact, state of affairs, or proposition) for each of its possible applications to some fixed relata. Kit Fine calls relations that do 'strictly symmetric'. Is there is a difference between the notions of necessary and strict symmetry that would prevent them (...) from being used interchangeably in such discussions? I show that there is. While the notions coincide assuming an intensional account of relations and their completions, according to which relations/completions are identical if they are necessarily coinstantiated/equivalent, they come apart assuming a hyperintensional account, which individuates relations and completions more finely on the basis of relations' real definitions. I establish this by identifying two definable relations, each of which is necessarily symmetric but nonetheless results in distinct facts when it applies to the same objects in opposite orders. In each case, I argue that these facts are distinct because they have different grounds. (shrink)

[David Charles] Aristotle, it appears, sometimes identifies well-being with one activity, sometimes with several, including ethical virtue. I argue that this appearance is misleading. In the Nicomachean Ethics, intellectual contemplation is the central case of human well-being, but is not identical with it. Ethically virtuous activity is included in human well-being because it is an analogue of intellectual contemplation. This structure allows Aristotle to hold that while ethically virtuous activity is valuable in its own right, the best life available for (...) humans is centred around, but not wholly constituted by, intellectual contemplation. /// [Dominic Scott] In Nicomachean Ethics X 7-8, Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of eudaimonia, primary and secondary. The first corresponds to contemplation, the second to activity in accordance with moral virtue and practical reason. My task in this paper is to elucidate this distinction. Like Charles, I interpret it as one between paradigm and derivative cases; unlike him, I explain it in terms of similarity, not analogy. Furthermore, once the underlying nature of the distinction is understood, we can reconcile the claim that paradigm eudaimonia consists just in contemplation with a passage in the first book requiring eudaimonia to involve all intrinsic goods. (shrink)

This paper revisits a 2003 publication in Nursing Philosophy: The need for accurate perception and informed judgement in determining the appropriate use of the nursing resource: hearing the patient's voice. The author suggests that the basic ideas and focus of this 16‐year‐old paper are still topical and relevant in considerations of nursing care. However, it is also suggested that greater attention to the importance of the nurse–patient relationship in considerations of resource allocation, and potential rationing of nursing care, would have (...) strengthened the original paper. (shrink)

The fully updated and revised third edition of this widely used text provides a comprehensive survey of leading perspectives in the field including an entirely new chapter on Realism by Jack Donnelly. The introduction explains the nature of theory and the reasons for studying international relations in a theoretically informed way. The nine chapters which follow--written by leading scholars in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand--provide thorough examinations of each of the major approaches currently prevailing in the (...) discipline. (shrink)

Exploring Law's Empire is a collection of essays by leading legal theorists and philosophers who have been invited to develop, defend, or critique Ronald Dworkin's controversial and exciting jurisprudence. The volume explores Dworkin's critique of legal positivism, his theory of law as integrity, and his writings on constitutional jurisprudence. Each essay is a cutting-edge contribution to its field of inquiry, the highlights of which include an introduction by Justice Stephen Breyer of the United States Supreme Court, and a concluding essay (...) by Dworkin himself. This final chapter responds to the preceding essays and lays out Dworkin's own vision for the future of jurisprdence over the coming years. (shrink)

It is hard to think of a more banal statement one could make about the law than to say that it necessarily claims legal authority to govern conduct. What, after all, is a legal institution if not an entity that purports to have the legal power to create rules, confer rights, and impose obligations? Whether legal institutions necessarily claim the moral authority to exercise their legal powers is another question entirely. Some legal theorists have thought that they do—others have not (...) been so sure. But no one has ever denied that the law holds itself out as having the legal authority to tell us what we may or may not do. (shrink)

One of the main themes that has emerged from behavioral decision research during the past three decades is the view that people's preferences are often constructed in the process of elicitation. This idea is derived from studies demonstrating that normatively equivalent methods of elicitation (e.g., choice and pricing) give rise to systematically different responses. These preference reversals violate the principle of procedure invariance that is fundamental to all theories of rational choice. If different elicitation procedures produce different orderings of options, (...) how can preferences be defined and in what sense do they exist? This book shows not only the historical roots of preference construction but also the blossoming of the concept within psychology, law, marketing, philosophy, environmental policy, and economics. Decision making is now understood to be a highly contingent form of information processing, sensitive to task complexity, time pressure, response mode, framing, reference points, and other contextual factors. (shrink)

Scientists often diverge widely when choosing between research programs. This can seem to be rooted in disagreements about which of several theories, competing to address shared questions or phenomena, is currently the most epistemically or explanatorily valuable—i.e. most successful. But many such cases are actually more directly rooted in differing judgments of pursuit-worthiness, concerning which theory will be best down the line, or which addresses the most significant data or questions. Using case studies from 16th-century astronomy and 20th-century geology and (...) biology, I argue that divergent theory choice is thus often driven by considerations of scientific process, even where direct epistemic or explanatory evaluation of its final products appears more relevant. Broadly following Kuhn’s analysis of theoretical virtues, I suggest that widely shared criteria for pursuit-worthiness function as imprecise, mutually-conflicting values. However, even Kuhn and others sensitive to pragmatic dimensions of theory ‘acceptance’, including the virtue of fruitfulness, still commonly understate the role of pursuit-worthiness—especially by exaggerating the impact of more present-oriented virtues, or failing to stress how ‘competing’ theories excel at addressing different questions or data. This framework clarifies the nature of the choice and competition involved in theory choice, and the role of alternative theoretical virtues. (shrink)

Swartz attempts the commendable task of motivating nonprofessional philosophers to engage in the activity of identifying and criticizing their own metaphysical theories. He does this first by explaining what a metaphysical theory is and how to evaluate it, and second by examining the plausibility of various theories concerning space, time, properties, synchronic identity, diachronic identity, and personal identity. A professional philosopher will find it easy to read. An upper-level undergraduate or beginning graduate student would, I imagine, find it challenging at (...) times but readable. There is a glossary of technical terms, further readings suggested, bibliographical references, a name index, and a subject index at the end of the book. (shrink)

Much education research takes place under a convenient but spurious assumption that there is a common purpose to education research, and a common epistemology. This book takes a clear-sighted and perceptive look at the underlying truths of education research, and in refining our understanding of the subject paves the way to improving our methods and practice. It addresses the theoretical conceptual elements educational discourses that inform most debates about educational research, including: education and its relationship to research; the problems and (...) possibilities of quantification; and the diversity of methods researchers can use to create theory. In a second section the book explores these issues as they relate to a number of current and controversial debates in education, such as: researching school effectiveness; the study of curriculum, policy, sociology and anthropology; and the role of post-modern though in debates on education. (shrink)

This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.

To clarify the proper role of values in science, focusing on controversial expert responses to Covid-19, this article examines the status of (in)convenient hypotheses. Polarizing cases like health experts downplaying mask efficacy to save resources for healthcare workers, or scientists dismissing “accidental lab leak” hypotheses in view of potential xenophobia, plausibly involve modifying evidential standards for (in)convenient claims. Societies could accept that scientists handle (in)convenient claims just like nonscientists, and give experts less political power. Or societies could hold scientists to (...) a higher bar, by expecting them not to modify evidential standards to avoid costs only incidentally tied to error. (shrink)

The use of contingent valuation methods for estimating the economic value of environmental improvements and damages has increased significantly. However, doubts exist regarding the validity of the usual willingness to pay CV methods. In this article, we examine the CV approach in light of recent findings from behavioral decision research regarding the constructive nature of human preferences. We argue that a principal source of problems with conventional CV methods is that they impose unrealistic cognitive demands upon respondents. We propose a (...) new CV approach, based on the value-structuring capabilities of multiattribute utility theory and decision analysis, and discuss its advantages and disadvantages. (shrink)