Despite the prevailing discourses on the importance of top management ethical leadership, related theoretical and empirical developments are lacking. Drawing on institutional theory, we propose that top management ethical leadership contributes to organizational outcomes by promoting firm-level ethical and procedural justice climates. This theoretical framework was empirically tested using multi-source data obtained from 4,468 employees of 147 Korean companies from various industries. The firm-level analysis shows that top management ethical leadership significantly predicts ethical climate, which then results in procedural justice (...) climate that fully mediates the effects of top management ethical leadership on two organizational outcomes, namely, firm-level organizational citizenship behavior and firm financial performance. The present study provides a plausible theoretical account and empirical validation of a mechanism through which top management ethical leadership enhances organizational performance. (shrink)

This study focuses on CEO hubris and its detrimental effect on corporate financial performance along with an examination of critical corporate governance contingencies that may moderate the negative effect. From 654 observations of 164 Korean firms over the years 2001–2008, we found that CEO power exacerbated the negative effect of CEO hubris on corporate financial performance, whereas board vigilance mitigated it. This study provides empirical evidence that entrenchment problems arising from CEO hubris would be exacerbated as CEOs become more powerful, (...) but weakened as board of directors become more vigilant. Theoretical contributions and practical implications will be discussed. (shrink)

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the interactive effects of perceived competence and task interest on the cognitive and affective responses to negative feedback. Twenty-four undergraduates performed both interesting and uninteresting tasks and received failure feedback. The participants’ perceived competence in the task was manipulated between subjects prior to scanning with bogus feedback. The results showed that negative feedback processing was contingent upon both perceived competence and task interest. The most adaptive coping mechanism, indicated by activation in the (...) cognitive control network and attenuation in the negative affect region, was identified for the high-competence and high-interest combination. When either competence or interest was low, signals in the cognitive control network were weaker. The most detrimental activation patterns were observed for the combination of low-competence and high interest. Our results reveal the combination of task and learner characteristics that best harnesses the potential benefits of negative feedback and illustrate the neuroscientific mechanisms underlying this observation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 95-113 [Access article in PDF] Further Buddhist Christian Dialogue: A Review Article of Hee Sung Keel's Understanding Shinran: A Dialogical Approach Alfred BloomUniversity of Hawai'iIt was my original intention to write a review of Professor Keel's book. The exceptional quality of the book itself, however, and the issues it raises concerning Shin Buddhism call for a more detailed exploration and discussion. Therefore, this (...) essay is a review article offered in the interests of promoting the dialogue which Professor Keel has so eloquently and capably initiated.With the appearance of Professor Keel's book the development of Shin studies has reached a major milestone. Aspects of Shinran's (1173-1262) life and thought have occasionally been discussed by scholars in the West and by participants in Buddhist-Christian dialogue conferences. In this work we have a detailed analysis of Shinran's thought and the problems and questions that emerge from his interpretation of Mahayana Buddhism and Pure Land teaching. The breadth of Professor Keel's knowledge of Shinran and the depth of his insight into the teaching will carry Buddhist-Christian dialogue into the relatively unexplored area of Shin Buddhist-Christian dialogue.Professor Keel underscores the fact that the translation of Shinran's writings into English has significantly advanced Shin studies by making the teachings available to a wider range of inquirers. It also demonstrates the great responsibility shouldered by Shin scholars who have produced these texts. They must respond substantively and positively to the issues raised by Professor Keel.Though he is clearly Christian, he offers a lucid, sensitive, and fair summation of Shinran's religious experience and thought. He has opened the door of dialogue by presenting an interpretation of Shinran which requires a response. He does not take the position that he possesses the truth, nor does he attempt to refute Shinran in favor of Christianity. He does not judge Shinran to be in error, so much as to point to the paradoxes and dilemmas that are implied in his thought. We shall focus on these later.His volume addresses features of the study of Shinran. Chapter One, entitled The Easy Path, takes up the social and religious background and context of Pure Land [End Page 95] teaching out of which Shinran emerged. Particularly important is the teaching of Honen (1133-1212) whose interpretation of the sole practice of nembutsu (recitation of Amida Buddha's name) threatened the traditional Buddhist establishment. Honen taught that the nembutsu recitation was fully sufficient to realize birth in the Pure Land and ultimate enlightenment without depending on the elaborate, complex Buddhist institutions which offered arduous, rigorous methods for attaining liberation from the bondage of finitude. The elevation of a single practice as the way to enlightenment characterizes the new forms of Buddhism in the Kamakura period (1185-1332).The emphasis on the sole practice of nembutsu devotion marking Honen's Pure Land teaching, Dogen's dedication to zazen meditation alone, and Nichiren's insistence on the recitation of the title of the Lotus Sutra [Saddharma-pundarika-sutra] all countered the worldliness and decline of the contemporary Buddhist order of the period, as well as responded to the social turbulence and disorder arising from social change and shifts of power in Japan at that time. These developments also provided the background of Shinran's religious search and inspired his interpretation of Pure Land teaching which, while trying to clarify Honen against his critics, went beyond the master in significant areas.In Chapter Two, Shinran the Bonpu, Keel takes up Shinran's religious development and life. Bonpu means a foolish, common mortal, an ordinary person. As Keel points out, religion begins with problems intrinsic to human life. In the case of Shinran, he became deeply aware of the great evils of ignorance, greed, and anger within himself and in his world. Shinran's existential seriousness and honesty led him to draw "the ultimate conclusion from the message of his master [Honen] and [push] it to the extremity of paradoxicality, giving... (shrink)

Hobbes’s own justification for the existence of governments relies on the assumption that, without a government, our lives in the state of nature would result in a state of war of every man against every man. Many contemporary scholars have tried to explain why universal war is unavoidable in Hobbes’s state of nature by utilizing modern game theory. However, most game-theoretic models that have been presented so far do not accurately capture what Hobbes deems to be the primary cause of (...) conflict in the state of nature – which is uncertainty, rather than people’s egoistic psychology. Any game- theoretic model that does not incorporate uncertainty into the picture is, therefore, I claim, the wrong model. In this paper, I use Bayesian game-theory to show how universal conflict can break-out in the state of nature - even when the majority of the population would strictly prefer to cooperate and seek peace with other people - due to uncertainty about the other person’s type. Along the way, I show that the valuation of one’s own life is one of the central mechanisms that drives Hobbes’s pessimistic conclusion. (shrink)

One of John Rawls’s major aims, when he wrote A Theory of Justice, was to present a superior alternative to utilitarianism. Rawls’s worry was that utilitarianism may fail to protect the fundamental rights and liberties of persons in its attempt to maximize total social welfare. Rawls’s main argument against utilitarianism was that, for such reasons, the representative parties in the original position will not choose utilitarianism, but will rather choose his justice as fairness, which he believed would securely protect the (...) worth of everybody’s basic rights and liberties. In this paper, I will argue that, under close formal examination, Rawls’s argument against utilitarianism is self-defeating. That is, I will argue that Rawls’s own reasons, assumptions, and the many theoretical devices he employs demonstrably imply that the representative parties in the original position will choose utilitarianism instead of justice as fairness. (shrink)

Ever since the publication of Harry Frankfurt’s “Equality as a Moral Ideal” :21–43, 1987), the doctrine of sufficiency has attracted great attention among both ethical theorists and political philosophers. The doctrine of sufficiency consists of two main theses: the positive thesis states that it is morally important for people to have enough; and the negative thesis states that once everybody has enough, relative inequality has absolutely no moral importance. Many political philosophers have presented different versions of sufficientarianism that retain the (...) general spirit of what Frankfurt had proposed in his seminal work. However, all of these different versions of sufficientarianism suffer from two critical problems: they fail to give right answers to lifeboat situations, and they fail to provide continuous ethical judgments. In this paper, I show a version of utilitarianism that solves these problems while retaining the major attractions of sufficientarianism. I call it “prospect utilitarianism.” In addition, I show that prospect utilitarianism can avoid standard objections to utilitarianism and has aspects that can appeal to both prioritarians and egalitarians as well. (shrink)

John Rawls’s most mature notion of political order is “stability for the right reasons.” Stability for the right reasons is the kind of political order that Rawls hoped a well-ordered society could ideally achieve. In this paper, I demonstrate through the tools of modern game theory, the instability of “stability for the right reasons.” Specifically, I will show that a well-ordered society can completely destabilize by the introduction of an arbitrarily small number of non- compliers whenever individuals fail to achieve (...) full common knowledge ever so slightly. (shrink)

Public reason liberalism takes as its starting point the deep and irreconcilable diversity we find characterizing liberal societies. This deep and irreconcilable diversity creates problems for social order. One method for adjudicating these conflicts is through the use of rights. This paper is about the ability of such rights to adjudicate disputes when perspectival disagreements—or disagreements over how to categorize objects in the world—obtain. We present both formal possibility and impossibility results for rights structures under varying degrees of perspectival diversity. (...) We show that though perspectival diversity appears to be a troubling problem for the prospect of stable social order, if rights are defined properly then disagreements can likely be resolved in a consistent manner, achieving social cooperation rather than conflict. (shrink)

The original position together with the veil of ignorance have served as one of the main methodological devices to justify principles of distributive justice. Most approaches to this topic have primarily focused on the single person decision-theoretic aspect of the original position. This paper, in contrast, will directly model the basic structure and the economic agents therein to project the economic consequences and social outcomes generated either by utilitarianism or Rawls’s two principles of justice. It will be shown that when (...) the differences in people’s productive abilities are sufficiently great, utilitarianism dominates Rawls’s two principles of justice by providing a higher level of overall well-being to every member of society. Whenever this is the case, the parties can rely on the Principle of Dominance (which is a direct implication of instrumental rationality) to choose utilitarianism over Rawls’s two principles of justice. Furthermore, when this is so, utilitarianism is free from one of its most fundamental criticisms that it ‘does not take seriously the distinction between persons’ (Rawls 1971 [1999]: 24). (shrink)

In a recently published paper entitled, “The Difference Principle Would Not Be Chosen behind the Veil of Ignorance”, Johan E. Gustafsson attempts to demonstrate that the parties in Rawls’s original position would not choose the difference principle. Gustafsson’s main strategy was to show that Rawls’s difference principle in both of its ex post and ex ante versions imply counterintuitive distributional prescriptions in a few contrived examples. The purpose of this paper is to precisely demonstrate exactly how Gustafsson’s arguments have failed (...) to show that the difference principle would not be chosen behind the veil of ignorance. (shrink)

The main purpose of this study was to validate a scale to examine the moral sensitivity of Korean nurses. A pre-existing scale, the Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire (MSQ), developed by Lützén, was used after deletion of three items. The reliability and validity of the scale were examined by using Cronbach’s alpha and factor analysis, respectively. According to the results, reliability of the scale was adequate but its construct validity was not fully supported. Through discussion on evidence of validity, five subconstructs emerged. (...) In particular, unlike the factor structure of the MSQ, two subconstructs, patient-oriented care and professional responsibility, were newly extracted. It was assumed that the other three MSQ subconstructs, conflict, meaning and benevolence (expressed as nurses being ethically good), would not be sensitive to cultural background. Given these findings, interpretations about the meaning of moral sensitivity of Korean nurses are discussed. (shrink)

This paper highlights the potential harms in the current state of business ethics education and presents an alternative new model of business ethics education. Such potential harms in business ethics education is due largely to restricted cognitive level of reasoning, a limited level of ethical conduct which remains only responsive and adaptive, and the estrangement between strategic thinking and ethical thinking. As a remedy for business ethics education, denatured by these potential harms, a new dynamic model of business ethics education (...) is proposed. The new model is composed of a basic foundation for business ethics education and three practical components of business ethics education. The basic foundation comprises of ethical reasoning, moral sentiments, and ethical praxis. Three practical components of business ethics education are, respectively, to intensify moral imagination, to develop ethical wisdom and courage, and to enhance meta- strategic competences. The ultimate purpose of these practical components is to help moral subjects to conduct ethical leadership, to actualize integrity between individuals and organization, and to fulfill the social responsibility of business firms. This new model is expected to attract attention to the effective business ethics education both in college and in industry, and to be used as a benchmark for new curriculum designs and development of teaching methods. Finally, some teaching methodologies and pedagogical experiments are introduced and discussed according to this new model of business ethics education. (shrink)

This study analyses the types and frequencies of ethical dilemmas and the rationale of ethical decision making in student nurses; it also evaluates their decision making. One hundred senior student nurses who were enrolled in a two-credit course in nursing ethics were asked to provide an informal description of a dilemma that they had experienced during their clinical practice. The results were as follows. The ethical dilemmas identified fell into four categories and were of 27 types. Those most frequently experienced (...) were ‘family giving up on a patient because he or she could not be cured’, and ‘not telling the truth to the patient’. The Korean Nurses’ Code of Ethics was applied, in particular the preamble, and the third, fourth, seventh and tenth clauses. The most common rule of ethics and principle applied in these nurses’ ethical decision making were veracity and nonmaleficence. With regard to the moral reasoning process, the primary concern was the welfare of the patients. These students were equipped with the ability to exercise critical and reflective thought when they experienced ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

A defining characteristic of a liberal democratic society is the assignment of basic rights and liberties that protect each person’s private sphere. Hence, social choice made in a liberal democratic society must at the very least be consistent with the exercise of each person’s basic rights. However, even when everybody agrees to this basic principle, there could still remain irreconcilable social conflict and disagreement when it comes to the specific assignment of basic rights. This is especially so in a pluralistic (...) society where there is a clash among radically different and incompatible world views. Philosophers have now started to focus on this issue, which now goes by the name “perspectival diversity.” This paper extends the basic social choice theoretic framework of liberal rights by extending the domain to include individual perspectives alongside individual preferences. In this new framework, different individuals are able to see or perceive the same social alternative differently based on their own unique perspectives. The formal results of the paper imply that generating a viable social choice that is consistent with the assignment of basic rights can quickly break down once we start to increase the level of perspectival diversity in society. (shrink)

During the last years the demand for regionally and culturally harmonised machine design is increasingly on the agenda. The problem of localising products like machine tools instantly poses the question for new procedures that allow including the regional and cultural adaptations into the design processes of machine tool companies. How to transform the general insight into the necessity of culture- and region-adapted technologies and how to embed it into a design procedure comprising applicable design attributes is the crucial problem addressed. (...) The paper shows in an exemplary way how ambiguous design attributes can eventually be embodied in a prototype design. (shrink)

It is often necessary and reasonable to justify preferences before reasoning from them. Moreover, justifying a preference ordering is reduced to justifying the criterion that produces the ordering. This paper builds on the well-known ASPIC+ formalism to develop a model that integrates justifying qualitative preferences with reasoning from the justified preferences. We first introduce a notion of preference criterion in order to model the way in which preferences are justified by an argumentation framework. We also adapt the notion of argumentation (...) theory to build a sequence of argumentation frameworks, in which an argumentation framework justifies preferences that are to underlie the next framework. That is, in our formalism, preferences become not only an input of an argumentation framework, but also an output of it. This kind of input-output process can be applied in the further steps of argumentation. We also explore some interesting properties of our formalism. (shrink)

Ninety-two Japanese elementary school sixth-graders (46 boys and 46 girls; 11–12 years old) learned the quota system as part of gender equality education. We used a group performance implicit association test (Mori, Uchida, and Imada, 2008) to evaluate the lesson's effect by assessing the children's image of “woman” before and after the class. The results showed that the image of “woman” among boys improved significantly from neutral to positive through the lesson. We also found that girls’ implicit image of “woman” (...) was statistically higher than that of boys before learning, and was raised considerably after the class. (shrink)

The problem of forgotten evidence consists of a pair of scenarios originally proposed by Alvin Goldman. In the “forgotten good evidence” and “forgotten bad evidence” scenarios, subjects hold the same memory belief while irreversibly forgetting its original, though different, pieces of evidence. The two scenarios pose a series of challenges to current time slice (CTS) theories, which posit that memory beliefs are justified solely by contemporaneous states. Goldman’s two scenarios pose an apparent dilemma to CTS theories given a naïve picture (...) of how a memory belief is successfully retained while its evidence is irreversibly forgotten. In my view, however, CTS theories may find a solution to the apparent problem by carefully examining the conditions under which a memory belief is successfully retained while its evidence is completely forgotten. Namely, the two scenarios overlook an important difference between forgetting good evidence and forgetting bad evidence. (shrink)

In this paper, we devise a network that consists of argumentation schemes and critical questions that participants in debates can use to easily construct arguments that attack or support former arguments. As a prototype, we build a potential network of argumentation schemes and critical questions with a practical reasoning scheme at its center. The usefulness of a NASCQ in constructing and reconstructing complex arguments and in formal argumentation is also explored along with argumentation more broadly.

Suppose we assume that the parties in the original position took Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory as constituting their general knowledge of human psychology that survives through the veil of ignorance. How would this change the choice situation of the original position? In this paper, I present what I call ‘prospect utilitarianism’. Prospect utilitarianism combines the utilitarian social welfare function with individual utility functions characterized by Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory. I will argue that, once prospect utilitarianism is on the (...) table, Rawls's original arguments in support of justice as fairness as well as his arguments against utilitarianism are, at best, inconclusive. This shows that how implausible a choice for utilitarianism in the original position is heavily depends on what one assumes to be general knowledge of human psychology that the original contracting parties know. (shrink)