It would seem, on the surface, logical that entrepreneurs would treat stakeholders with honesty and respect. However, this is not always the case—at times, entrepreneurs lie to stakeholders in order to take a step closer to achieving legitimacy. It is these legitimacy lies that are the focus of the current work. Overall, while we know that legitimacy lies are told, we know very little about the psychological processes at work that may make it more likely for someone to tell a (...) legitimacy lie. Thus, we theorize about the pressure to pursue legitimacy, the situational and individual factors that affect this pursuit, as well as how this context can lead to moral disengagement and the telling of legitimacy lies. Our theorizing advances the existing literature and provides a dynamic framework by which future research can delve more deeply into the nuanced context that breeds the escalation of legitimacy lies. (shrink)

Despite universal agreement that corruption is norm-deviant, the criteria required to ascertain deviance remain elusive. The problem is even more pronounced for organizational corruption, not least because the construct remains somewhat ambiguous and is often conflated with proximate management constructs like antisocial or unethical organizational behavior. In this article, I identify the suitable criteria for the determination of deviance in organizational corruption and determine whether it is, indeed, antisocial or unethical. In order to minimize ambiguity, I first limit the scope (...) of organizational corruption to corruption within, rather than by, organizations, which is most conceptually challenging insofar as the aforementioned questions are concerned. I then conclude that organizational corruption should be specified solely with respect to the focal organization’s normative framework; it is anti-organizational rather than antisocial. Higher level normative prescriptions that arise from the organization’s embedding within its social context remain relevant, but only insofar as they are incorporated within the organization’s normative framework. Moreover, I argue that organizational corruption is not necessarily unethical, since the moral evaluation of an organizational act is, in principle, distinct from the determination of its deviance to organizational norms. (shrink)

"In 1962, the young Eugene Rose undertook to write a monumental chronicle of the abandonment of Truth in the modern age. Of the hundreds of pages of material he compiled for this work, only the present essay, on Nihilism, has come down to us in completed form. Here Eugene reveals the core of all modern thought and life--the belief that all truth is relative--and shows how this belief has been translated into action in our era. Today, nearly half a century (...) after he wrote it, this essay is more timely than ever. It clearly explains why contemporary ideas, values, and attitudes--the "spirit of the age"--are shifting so rapidly in the direction of moral anarchy, as the philosophy of Nihilism enters more deeply into the fiber of society. Nietszche was right when he predicted that the twentieth century would usher in "the triumph of Nihilism."--Back cover. (shrink)

This collection addresses a post-WWII shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations, where the highest goal moves from reductionism towards some ...

For the theorists of crisis, the revolutionary state comes into existence through violence, and due to its inability to provide an authoritative katechon (restrainer) against internal and external violence, it perpetuates violence until it self-destructs. Writing during extreme economic depression and growing social and political violence, the crisis theorists––Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, and Carl Schmitt––each sought to blame the chaos of their time upon the Janus-faced postrevolutionary ideals of liberalism and socialism by urging a return to pre-revolutionary moral (...) and religious values. They are united by three counterrevolutionary principles, all of which are purported to remedy revolutionary violence: traditional constitutional fidelity, the philosophy of the decision, and opposition to bourgeois liberalism. This essay is followed by the first complete English translation and publication of Donoso’s letter of October 24, 1851, which contains Donoso’s only reference to the “discussing class,” a political entity later popularized by Schmitt in his 1922 work Political Theology. (shrink)

Organizational corruption has recently attracted considerable scholarly attention, especially since its devastating effects following recent major corporate scandals, the worldwide economic crisis of 2009, and the current European Union monetary crisis. This paper is based on the analysis of three distinct, yet contextually related, case studies in a European Union member state: (a) an incident of corruption by a minister in an adjudicative role, (b) widespread financial misreporting and perjury within an organization, and (c) abuse of due process and obstruction (...) of justice by civil servants within a ministry. These cases serve to illustrate, for the first time, Aguilera and Vadera’s (in J Bus Ethics 77:431–449, 2008 ) framework of organizational corruption, which relates distinct types of a corrupter’s opportunity, motivation, and justification with the type of corruption present in the organization. Furthermore, the data suggest how the framework may be extended and reveal conceptual issues that require reconciliation. This study attempts such reconciliations and offers some suggestions on how the findings may be utilized by policy reformers or corruption controllers. (shrink)

On the Paths of Anger : The Space-Time of a Revolt, Athens, December 2008. The aim of the article is to throw some light on a particular form of political conflict, one which has till now has been little explored in theoretical terms : insurrectional collective action. While the article is an examination of the « events of the Greek December », taking these events to be a typical expression of this sporadic mode of collective action, its primary task is (...) a conceptual one. Events of a similar nature are often interpreted as cases of rioting. Having first defined the notion of the « riot », the article then goes on to argue that the “Greek December” was not a “routine” riot, that it constituted a specific and conflictual mode of engagement in politics : insurrectional collective action. The article argues that the distinctive and determining factor is to be located in the process of propagation of the acts of rioting over a spatial span going far beyond the initial flashpoint. The process of diffusion cannot be apprehended if we fail to take into consideration three dimensions of a conflictual politics, which till then had been neglected : the emotional, the spatial, and the temporal. (shrink)

Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of goodness—those that take there to be (...) absolute goodness—are comparatively rich: they offer grounds for judging some types of things better than others because they have more absolute goodness. Moorean accounts, for example, can tell us that humans and human experiences are superior to bees and blades of grass. But such theories tend to be descriptively poor: they struggle to tell us in virtue of what this is so. In this essay we motivate and flesh out a view that splits the difference between accounts of goodness as relative and accounts of goodness as absolute. Such a view holds promise only if the mechanics of this kind of metaphysics of goodness can be worked out. Here we present a view on which the paradigm for absolute goodness is God and the paradigm for each kind of relative goodness is a divine idea. (shrink)

Since 1900, debates about the justification of punishment have also been debates about the cause of crime. In the early twentieth century, the rehabilitative ideal of punishment viewed mental illness and dysfunction in individuals as the cause of crime. Starting in the 1970s, retributivism identified the immorality of human agents as the source of crime, which dovetailed well with the “tough-on-crime” political milieu of the 1980s and 1990s that produced mass incarceration. After surveying these historical trends, Wirts argues for a (...) social critical view that crime is best understood as a product of an unjust society, not faulty human beings. This view should take the lessons learned by the critiques of rehabilitation, however, and resist the tendency to reduce human beings to recipients of social services. (shrink)

Donald Davidson has made enormous contributions to the philosophy of action, epistemology, semantics and philosophy of mind and today is recognized as one of the most important analytical philosophers of the late twentieth century. _Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Knowledge_ addresses * Davidson's writings on epistemology and theory of language with their implications of ontology and philosophy of mind * the central issue of whether truth is the ultimate goal of enquiry, challenged by contributions from Richard Rorty and Paul Horwich (...) * Davidson's approach to semantics and applied linguistics as addressed by Kirk Ludwig, Gabriel Segal, Peter Pagin, Stephen Neale, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore and Reinaldo Elugardo * Davidson's advances in the philosophy of mind in relation to the views of Williard V. Quine, John McDowell and Peter F. Strawson, in essays by Roger Gibson and Anita Avramides. (shrink)

The topic of professionalism has dominated the content of major academic medicine publications during the past decade and continues to do so. The message of this current wave of professionalism is that medical educators need to be more attentive to the moral sensibilities of trainees, to their interpersonal and affective dimensions, and to their social conscience, all to the end of skilled, humanistic physicians. Urgent calls to address professionalism from such groups as the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American (...) Board of Internal Medicine, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, among others. In fact, at the 2004 annual meeting of the AAMC six separate presentations addressed professionalism with such titles as "Evaluating Humanism and Professionalism," Professionalism: Expectation, Education, Evaluation," or "Toward Assessing Professional Behaviors of Medical Students through Peer Observations". Professionalism, then, has become part of the current academic medicine parlance, used by administrators, clinical faculty, residency programs, and professional organizations with an expectation of shared meanings and goals. All of these stakeholders focus on what has become a consistent list of attributes deemed to be the essence of professionalism, which usually include variations on altruism, duty, excellence, honor and integrity, accountability, and respect. In fact, most of the scholarly work to date has been listing, describing, decrying, and measuring/evaluating it. In this collection of essays, we don’t argue with these attributes. Instead, we ask questions of the discourse from which they arise, how the specialized language of academic medicine disciplines has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes, values, and behaviors subsumed under the label "professional" or "professionalism." This collection aims to be a critical text, one that questions the profession’s beliefs about the nature of its work and how such beliefs are enacted in medical education, particularly as they fuel the professionalism discourse. In addition, we will scrutinize how the discourse is enacted in both the formal and hidden curriculum, and in the larger medical environment. (shrink)

The spiritual geography of Russian cosmism. General characteristics ; Recent definitions of cosmism -- Forerunners of Russian cosmism. Vasily Nazarovich Karazin (1773-1842) ; Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749-1802) ; Poets: Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, (1711-1765) and Gavriila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816) ; Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky (1803-1869) ; Aleksander Vasilyevich Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) -- The Russian philosophical context. Philosophy as a passion ; The destiny of Russia ; Thought as a call for action ; The totalitarian cast of mind -- The religious and spiritual (...) context. The kingdom of god on earth ; Hesychasm: two great Russian saints ; The Third Rome ; Pre-Christian antecedents -- The Russian esoteric context. Early searches for "deep wisdom" ; Popular magic ; Higher magic in the time of Peter the Great ; Esotericism after Peter the Great ; Theosophy and anthroposophy -- Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829-1903), the philosopher of the common task ; The one idea ; The unacknowledged prince ; The village teacher ; First disciple: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ; The Moscow librarian ; Last years: Askhabad: the only portrait -- The "common task" ; Esoteric dimensions of the "common task" ; Fedorov's legacy: projectivism, delo, regulation -- The religious cosmists. Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853-1900) ; Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871-1944) ; Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky (1882-1937) ; Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) -- The scientific cosmists. Konstantin Edouardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) ; Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945) ; Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky (1897-1964) ; Vasily Feofilovich Kuprevich (1897-1969) -- Promethean theurgy. Life-creation ; Cultural immortalism ; God-building ; Re-aiming the arrows of Eros ; Technological utopianism ; Occultism -- Fedorov's twentieth century followers. Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson (1844-1919) and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kozhevnikov (1852-1917) ; Svyatogor and the biocosmists ; New wine and the universal task ; Alexander Konstantinovich Gorsky (1886-1943) and Nikolai Alexandrovich Setnitsky (1888-1937) ; Valerian Nikolaevich Muravyov (1885-1932) ; Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin (1897-1922) -- Cosmism and its offshoots today. The N.F. Fedorov museum-library ; The Tsiolkovsky museum and Chizhevsky center ; ISRICA - Institute for Scientific Research in Cosmic Anthropoecology ; Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912-1992) and neo-eurasianism ; The hyperboreans ; Scientific immortalism: Igor Vishev, Danila Medvedev ; Conclusions about the Russian cosmists. (shrink)

Twentieth-century developments in quantum physics, together with an emerging science of consciousness, have created the need for a new cosmology, or model of the universe. The theory of process contained in THE REFLEXIVE UNIVERSE places consciousness within the context of contemporary science. One of the central themes of this extraordinary work is that each successive organization of matter, from fundamental particles in physics to living organisms, expresses a particular stage in the evolution of mind. Starting with the photon, the basic (...) unit of light, and moving through atomic physics, molecular chemistry, the morphology of plants and animals and finally to levels of human evolution, Young develops his theory in vivid step-by-step detail. Consciousness, in his point of view, is not isolated from the material universe. It exists in a continuum, one in which physical and nonphysical realms can be linked and the teachings of mythology and religion can be integrated. To order: FAX: 415-883-9280; e-mail: [email protected]; or write: Anodos Foundation, c/o Publishers Services, P.O. Box 2510, Novato, CA 94948. Visa and MasterCard only. Trade STOP orders 40% plus postage. (shrink)

From folk tales to movies, stories possess features which naturally suit them to contribute to the growth of virtue. In this article I show that the fictional exemplars help the learner to grasp the moral importance of internal states and resolves a tension between existing kinds of exemplars discussed by virtue ethicists. Stories also increase the information conveyed by virtue terms and aid the growth of prudence. Stories can provide virtuous exemplars, inform learners as to the nature of the virtues (...) and offer practice in developing situational judgement. As such they are a significant resource for virtue ethics and moral education. (shrink)

Bioethics has paid surprisingly little attention to the special problems faced by women and to feminist analyses of current health care issues other than ...

Arguably no concept is more fundamental to science than that of causality, for investigations into cases of existence, persistence, and change in the natural world are largely investigations into the causes of these phenomena. Yet the metaphysics and epistemology of causality remain unclear. For example, the ontological categories of the causal relata have been taken to be objects (Hume 1739), events (Davidson 1967), properties (Armstrong 1978), processes (Salmon 1984), variables (Hitchcock 1993), and facts (Mellor 1995). (For convenience, causes and effects (...) will usually be understood as events in what follows.) Complicating matters, causal relations may be singular (Socrates’s drinking hemlock caused Socrates’s death) or general (Drinking hemlock causes death); hence the relata might be tokens (e.g., instances of properties) or types (e.g., types of events) of the category in question. Other questions up for grabs are: Are singular causes metaphysically and/or epistemologically prior to general causes or vice versa (or neither)? What grounds the intuitive asymmetry of the causal relation? Are macro-causal relations reducible to micro-causal relations? And perhaps most importantly: Are causal facts (e.g., the holding of causal relations) reducible to non-causal facts (e.g., the holding of certain spatiotemporal relations)? (shrink)

Much discussion about experimental philosophy and philosophical methodology has been framed in terms of the reliability of intuitions, and even when it has not been about reliability per se, it has been focused on whether intuitions meet whatever conditions they need to meet to be trustworthy as evidence. But really that question cannot be answered independently from the questions, evidence for what theories arrived at by what sorts of inferences? I will contend here that not just philosophy's sources of evidence, (...) but also its inferential resources, are in great need of closer examination. (shrink)

Linguistic anthropologists have studied emotion in societies around the world for several decades. This article defines the discipline, introduces its general relevance to emotion theory, then presents five of the most important contributions linguistic anthropology has made to the study of emotion.

This volume provides a philosophical introduction to and analysis of the study of metaphor. By proceeding from the concrete analysis of complex metaphors, White is able to identify a range of features which are incompatible with standard accounts of the way words function in metaphor.

In this paper I argue that both defence and criticism of the claim that humans act ‘under the guise of the good’ neglects the metaphysical roots of the theory. I begin with an overview of the theory and its modern commentators, with critics noting the apparent possibility of acting against the good, and supporters claiming that such actions are instances of error. These debates reduce the ‘guise of the good’ to a claim about intention and moral action, and in so (...) doing have become divorced from the theory's roots in classical and medieval philosophy. Aristotle and Aquinas’ ‘guise of the good’ is primarily a metaphysical claim resting on the equivalence between actuality and goodness, from which conclusions about moral action are derived. I show the reasoning behind their theory and how it forms the basis for the claims about intention and action at the centre of the modern debate. Finally, I argue that the absence of its original foundation is apparent in recent attacks on the ‘guise of the good’. It is unsurprising that modern action theory and ethics have not always been able to comfortably accommodate the ‘guise of the good’; they are only telling half of the story. (shrink)

Studien zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Wissenschaftssystematik im 19. Jahrhundert Josef M. Werle. Drittes Kapitel Argumente zugunsten der Zukunft der Philosophie II: Wissenschaftsgeschichtliche und wissenschaftssystematische ...