American businesses, their leaders, and the business schools that developed these leaders find themselves under public scrutiny. As a result, business programs have placed increased emphasis on developing and implementing curriculum to address business ethics, which presents practitioners with the issue of how to define, measure, and evaluate business ethics curriculum. The purpose of this study was to examine the business ethics curriculum in AACSB-accredited business schools in the U.S. A framework for defining and examining the curriculum was developed using (...) Lattuca and Stark’s (2009) Academic Plan, and other variables from the literature relevant to the business ethics curriculum were examined. The results indicated that the current business ethics curriculum in most business schools has all of the academic plan elements: an ethics-related learning goal; content in a variety of subjects and at a variety of levels; a sequence that has been applied to it; learners’ needs addressed; appropriate and even innovative learning processes; the necessary resources including faculty; assurance of learning at the program level; and has been adjusted an average of 2.6 times in the last five years. Commonly, business ethics is integrated throughout the business curriculum in addition to having an ethics class available, whether elective or required. Faculty generally create and support an ethical culture and the program’s efforts to include business ethics in the curriculum. (shrink)

Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity: An Annotated Translation of Tsung-mi's Yuan-jen lun with a Modern Commentary. Peter N. Gregory. A Kuroda Institute Book. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu 1995, xv, 264 pp. Cloth $46.00, pbk $17.95.

There exists substantial cultural variation in how emotions are expressed, but there is also considerable evidence for universal properties in facial and vocal affective expressions. This is the first empirical effort examining the perception of vocal emotional expressions across cultures with little common exposure to sources of emotion stimuli, such as mass media. Shuar hunter-horticulturalists from Amazonian Ecuador were able to reliably identify happy, angry, fearful and sad vocalizations produced by American native English speakers by matching emotional spoken utterances to (...) emotional expressions portrayed in pictured faces. The Shuar performed similarly to English speakers who heard the same utterances in a content-filtered condition. These data support the hypothesis that vocal emotional expressions of basic affective categories manifest themselves in similar ways across quite disparate cultures. (shrink)

The article focuses on the value of opacity in communication. Jurgen Habermas's and M.M. Bakhtin's attitudes toward transparent or undistorted communication define almost antithetical approaches to the relationship between public discourse and autonomy. Habermas, both in his theory of communicative action and in his discourse ethics, assumes that transparent communication is possible and actually makes transparency a necessary condition for the legitimation of social norms. Yet, there is a sense in which the same kind of transparency that offers the possibility (...) of rational and autonomous selfhood to Habermas signifies vulnerability and tyranny to Bakhtin. In contrast to Habermas, Bakhtin assumes that utterances can never be perfectly transparent because the words that comprise them always carry meanings that exceed the intentions of speakers. This excess semantic value inevitably distorts speakers' intentions, even if only slightly. Bakhtin's suspicion of transparency leads him to develop a model of autonomy that revolves around the individual's ability to resist the emergence of transparency. However, Bakhtin attributes a positive ethical value to certain kinds of opacity because it is in the differences and distortions that Bakhtin situates the process through which individuals construct autonomy. Thus, in a kind of communicative paradox, opacity and ambiguity play the same liberating role in Bakhtin's thought that transparency and clarity play in Habermas's. (shrink)

Understanding how impactful scientific articles were funded informs future funding decisions. The structural significance of articles is broken down into two submeasures: citation count and “generativity”. Generativity is an attempt to provide a quantitative operationalization of transformativeness, a concept often used as a funding criterion despite not being a well-defined construct. This report identifies highly impactful and generative publications indexed in the subject area of psychology in the Web of Science in the year 2002. Publications that reported funding sources were (...) found to be more generative than those that did not, and research that was privately funded was found to be more generative than publicly funded research. This analysis is exploratory, and hopefully contributes to a foundation for future empirical investigations into the structure and nature of transformative science that granting agencies would want to fund. (shrink)

Forty-nine members of the Oxford public took part in a controlled free-recall experiment, the first 'minimal counterintuitiveness theory' study to control concept inferential potential and participant selective-attention timing. Recall of counterintuitive ideas was compared with recall of ideas expressing necessary epistemic incongruence, analytically true ideas, and ordinary control ideas. The items expressing necessary epistemic incongruence had better recall than other items. MCI items had a mnemonic advantage over intuitive templates for participants twenty-five years and younger after a one-week delay, but (...) MCI items did not have an advantage for older participants. There was no mnemonic advantage for immediate recall of MCI items in any age group. Analyses suggest this general failure to replicate previously found mnemonic advantages may have been due to restricting the items' inferential potential. (shrink)

Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Al- though these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence (...) moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms rather than inherent features of human moral judgment. (shrink)

Gregory T. Doolan provides here the first detailed consideration of the divine ideas as causal principles. He examines Thomas Aquinas's philosophical doctrine of the divine ideas and convincingly argues that it is an essential element of his metaphysics. According to Thomas, the ideas in the mind of God are not only principles of his knowledge, but they are productive principles as well. In this role, God's ideas act as exemplars for things that he creates. As Doolan shows, this theory (...) of exemplarism is an integral part of Thomas's account of the existence and order of the created universe. It also accounts in part for the freedom of God's creative act. The volume begins with an introduction to Thomas's doctrine of exemplarism and then addresses his arguments for the existence of exemplar ideas within the mind of God. Having established the existence of divine ideas, Doolan considers how Thomas reconciles their multiplicity with God's simplicity. The work identifies the various things for which Thomas posits divine ideas. As Doolan is careful to show, Thomas does not consider all of these ideas to be exemplars because not all of them act as causal principles. After identifying the ideas that do act in this way, Doolan considers how such exemplars can be causes of natural things without compromising the causality of natural agents. The volume culminates with a consideration of the role that the divine ideas play within the structure of Thomas's theory of participation. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Gregory T. Doolan, assistant professor of philosophy at The Catholic University of America, is a contributor to Wisdom's Apprentice: Thomistic Essays in Honor of Lawrence Dewan, O.P., and Reassessing the Liberal State: Reading Maritain's Man and the State. This is his first book. (shrink)

If “Big Gods” evolved in part because of their ability to morally regulate groups of people who cannot count on kin or reciprocal altruism to get along, then powerful gods would tend to be good gods. If the mechanism for this cooperation is some kind of fear of supernatural punishment, then we may expect that mighty gods tend to be punishing gods. The present study is a statistical analysis of superhuman being concepts from 20 countries on five continents to explore (...) whether the goodness of a god is related to its mightiness. Gods that looked more like the God of classical theism and gods that were low in anthropomorphism were more likely to be regarded as morally good and to be the target of religious practices. Mighty gods were not, however, especially likely to punish or to be a “high god.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering Grayson Douglas Browning (1929–2023)Gregory Pappas, David Hildebrand, and William T. MyersBrowning, Grayson Douglas was born on March 7, 1929, in Seminole, Oklahoma.He received his PhD from the University Texas, Austin, 1958, where he returned later in 1972 to become its Philosophy Department chairman for four years.He was president of the Southwestern Philosophical Association in 1977, of the Florida Philosophical Association in 1967, and of the Southern Society (...) for Philosophy and Psychology in 1972.He was not only a member of the Society for Advancement of America Philosophy; he encouraged all of his students to attend and become members of this society. Among these former students are Bill Myers, David Hildebrand, and Gregory Pappas.He thought that this was one of the best societies, not only because of its pluralism and scholarship, but because it was a community. He was right!He was the author of several books of philosophy, including Act and Agent and Ontology and the Practical Arena, and he co-edited Philosophers of Process (with William T. Myers). He also has published poetry in Voices, A Journal of Poetry and the Beloit Poetry Journal.In the last years of his life, Doug Browning was a retired Professor of Philosophy, living outside Georgetown, Texas, where he labored at length over poems and novels, staying up throughout the night reading, writing, listening to jazz, and smoking cigars, and enjoying life in his countryside hacienda with his beautiful wife, Becky. During that time, he managed to write and publish sixteen books of fiction. [End Page 106]For us (his former students), one of the most important philosophical contributions of Doug Browning was his insistence that if there is a key lesson from American Philosophy, it is the importance of lived experience ("La Vida") as the "starting point" of philosophical investigation.As he wrote in one of his last published essays:[T]he point is that, wherever one thinks we should start, we can't start with the world. We can't start with the world and we can't test our theories by testing them against the world. Whatever we take to indicate or to provide evidence of a "real" world apart from experience must be found, can only be found, in experience. It must be found in the glass of Barrilito, the aroma of a good cigar, conversation among friends, hotel hallways, cats, thunderstorms, oak trees, and all of the brazen and all of the unpretentious things that we encounter and live among in our day-to-day lives.1Gregory PappasTexas A&M UniversityDavid HildebrandUniversity of Colorado DenverWilliam T. MyersBirmingham-Southern Collegenote1. Douglas Browning, "Dewey and Ortega on the Starting Point," Pragmatism in the Americas, edited by Gregory Fernando Pappas (Fordham UP, 2011), p. 155.Copyright © 2024 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois... (shrink)

Some theorists hold that the human perceptual system has a component that receives input only from units lower in the perceptual hierarchy. This thesis, that we shall here refer to as the encapsulation thesis, has been at the center of a continuing debate for the past few decades. Those who deny the encapsulation thesis often rely on the large body of psychological findings that allegedly suggest that perception is influenced by factors such as the beliefs, desires, goals, and the expectations (...) of the perceiver. Proponents of the encapsulation thesis, however, often argue that, when correctly interpreted, these psychological findings are compatible with the thesis. In our view, the debate over the significance and the correct interpretation of these psychological findings has reached an impasse. We hold that this impasse is due to the methodological limitations over psychophysical experiments, and it is very unlikely that such experiments, on their own, could yield results that would settle the debate. After defending this claim, we argue that integrating data from cognitive neuroscience resolves the debate in favor of those who deny the encapsulation thesis. (shrink)

Context: There is a growing recognition in consciousness science of the need for rigorous methods for obtaining accurate and detailed phenomenological reports of lived experience, i.e., descriptions of experience provided by the subject living them in the “first-person.” Problem: At the moment although introspection and debriefing interviews are sometimes used to guide the design of scientific studies of the mind, explicit description and evaluation of these methods and their results rarely appear in formal scientific discourse. Method: The recent publication of (...) an edited book of papers dedicated to the exploration of first-and second-person methods, Ten Years of Viewing from Within: The Legacy of Francisco Varela, serves as a starting point for a discussion of how these methods could be integrated into the growing discipline of consciousness science. We complement a brief review of the book with a critical analysis of the major pilot studies in Varela’s neurophenomenology, a research program that was explicitly devised to integrate disciplined experiential methods with the latest advances in neuroscience. Results: The book is a valuable resource for those who are interested in impressive recent advances in first- and second-person methods, as applied to the phenomenology of lived experience. However, our review of the neurophenomenology literature concludes that there is as yet no convincing example of these specialized techniques being used in combination with standard behavioral and neuroscientific approaches in consciousness science to produce results that could not have also been achieved by simpler methods of introspective reporting. Implications: The end of behaviorism and the acceptance of verbal reports of conscious experience have already enabled the beginning of a science of consciousness. It can only be of benefit if new first- and second-person methods become well-known across disciplines. Constructivist content: Constructivism has long been interested in the role of the observer in the constitution of our sense of reality, so these developments in the science of consciousness may open new avenues of constructivist research. More specifically, one of the ways in which the insights from first- and second-person methods are being validated is by recursively applying the methods to themselves; a practical application of an epistemological move that will be familiar to constructivists from the second-order cybernetics tradition. (shrink)

What I have attempted to show in the foregoing is that: (1) For any frequency adjective f, there is an element of meaning common to both the adverbial and the generic usage of f; this is a function f′ from propositions to truth-values such that f′(Φ)′ is true at an interval i iff Φ′ is true at subintervals of i distributed through i in a certain way. (2) In an adverbial use of f, f′ functions like the corresponding frequency adverb. (...) (3) In a generic use of f, f′ quantifies the times intervals which a specified object is realized by some stage. (4) In their adverbial usage, frequency adjectives are not regular attributive adjectives at the level at which interpretation takes place, but are perhaps determiners. And (5) in their generic usage, frequency adjectives are adjectives at the level at which interpretation takes place.More generally, I hope to have suggested something of the range of uses to which frequency is put in natural language. That we effortlessly grasp what is meants by Monday, the Columbus Dispatch, autumn, the Today Show, and so on, demonstrates our fluency in interpreting certain sequences of objects, events, or states of affairs as sequences of values of some function cycling on a time-axis. Much more must ultimately be told about the psychological and anthropological significance of frequency. (shrink)

Moral uncertainty and disagreement pervade our lives. Yet we still need to make decisions and act, both individually and politically. So, what should we do? Moral uncertainty theorists provide a theory of what individuals should do when they are uncertain about morality. Public reason liberals provide a theory of how societies should deal with reasonable disagreements about morality. They defend the public justification principle: state action is permissible only if it can be justified to all reasonable people. In this article, (...) we bring these two approaches together. Specifically, we investigate whether considerations of moral uncertainty support public reason liberalism: given moral uncertainty, should we favor public justification? We argue that while moral uncertainty theory cannot vindicate an exceptionless public justification principle, it supports adopting public justification as a pro tanto principle – albeit one that can be overridden when the moral stakes are high. It also provides new answers to some intramural debates among public reason liberals and new responses to some common objections. (shrink)

Although the ability to perform gene therapy in human germ-line cells is still hypothetical, the rate of progress in molecular and cell biology suggests that it will only be a matter of time before reliable clinical techniques will be within reach. Three sets of arguments are commonly advanced against developing those techniques, respectively pointing to the clinical risks, social dangers and better alternatives. In this paper we analyze those arguments from the perspective of the client-centered ethos that traditionally governs practice (...) in medical genetics. This perspective clarifies the merits of these arguments for geneticists, and suggests useful new directions for the professional discussion of germ-line gene therapy. It suggests, for example, that the much discussed prospect of germ-line therapy in human pre-embryos may always be more problematic for medical genetics than adult germ-line interventions, even though the latter faces greater technical difficulties. (shrink)

Most debate about the ethical implications of modern biotechnology has centred around medical issues, but public concerns over the impact of agricultural biotechnologies have gathered momentum. This volume, resulting from the 55th University of Nottingham Easter School in Agricultural and Food Science, provides a survey of this new field of enquiry. The book will be of interest to a wide readership, including applied philosophers, sociologists, economists and ecologists, as well as biotechnologists and agricultural and food scientists.

According to Thomas Aquinas, the ideas in the mind of God serve two distinct although interrelated roles: (1) as epistemological principles accounting for God’s knowledge of things other than himself, and (2) as ontological or causal principles involved in God’s creative activity. This article examines the causal role of the divine ideas by focusing on their relation to natural agents. Given Thomas’s observation that from God’s intellect “forms flow forth (effluunt) into all creatures,” the article considers whether the causality of (...) the divine ideas excludes that of natural agents, or whether both modes of causality can somehow produce one and the same effect. (shrink)

We consider how human subjects establish signaling conventions in the context of Lewis-Skyrms signaling games. These experiments involve games where there are precisely the right number of signal types to represent the states of nature, games where there are more signal types than states, and games where there are fewer signal types than states. The aim is to determine the conditions under which subjects are able to establish signaling conventions in such games and to identify a learning dynamics that approximates (...) how they succeed when they do. Our results suggest that human agents tend to use a win-stay/lose-shift with inertia dynamics to establish conventions in such games. We briefly consider the virtues and vices of this low-rationality dynamics. (shrink)

In a number of texts throughout his career, Thomas Aquinas identifies different senses of the term ‘esse’. Most notably, he notes that according to one sense, the term signifies the act of existence (actus essendi), which he famously holds is really distinct from essence in all beings other than God. Perhaps surprisingly, he also notes on a number of occasions that according to another sense, the term ‘esse’ can signify that very principle that he says is distinct from the act (...) of existence, namely, essence. In light of Aquinas's semantic theory, this paper investigates how he coherently holds within his metaphysical system that this term ‘esse’ can signify in different ways both essence and the act of existence. More broadly, what it shows is how, for Aquinas, the metaphysician can look to the modes of signification (modi significandi) of terms and as well as their modes of predication (modi praedicandi) to draw careful conclusions about the modes of existence (modi essendi) of real beings. These considerations reveal that in Aquinas's view, although the grammarian and logician in their way are also concerned with these semantic modes, it is not their job to employ them to discern the various senses of the term ‘being’ or the fundamental modes of being. In the end, this is a task for the metaphysician. (shrink)

Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness: Zen Talks on the Sandokai. Shunryu Suzuki, edited by Mel Weitsman and Michael Wenger. University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles 1999. viii, 195 pp. $22.50. ISBN 0-52-21982-1.

This article argues that the traditional jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria are fully capable of providing the ethical guidance needed to legitimately conduct military cyber operations. The first part examines the criteria’s foundations by focusing on the notion of liability to defensive harm worked out by revisionist just war thinkers. The second part critiques the necessity of alternative frameworks, which its proponents assert are required to at least supplement the traditional just war criteria. Using the latter, the (...) third part evaluates ethical issues germane to responding to cyber force, including casus belli, moral aspects of “the attribution problem,” and respective rights and duties when attacks involve innocent third-party states. The fourth part addresses in bello issues, including compliance with discrimination, necessity, and civilian due care imperatives; whether civilians may be targeted with sub-“use of force” cyber-attacks and the permissibility of using civilian contractors to conduct cyber-attacks. Throughout these analyses, conclusions are brought into conversation with those of The Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare. (shrink)

Society and the Supernatural in Song China. Edward L. Davis. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu 2001. xi, 355 pp. Hbk $60.00, pbk $29.92. ISBN 0-8248-2398-2, 0-8248-2310-9.

The Koan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism. Edited by Steve Heine and Dale Wright. Oxford University Press, New York 2000. xii, 322 pp. £30.00, 13.95. ISBN 0-19-511748-4, 0-19-511749-2.

The Skill in Means Sutra. Mark Tatz. Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1994. 128 pp. Rs 150.

The study of conversational humor has received relatively little empirical attention with almost no examinations of the role of vocal signals in spontaneous humor production. Here we report an analysis of spontaneous humorous speech in a rural Brazilian collective farm. The sample was collected over the course of ethnographic fieldwork in northeastern Brazil, and is drawn specifically from the monthly communal business meetings conducted in Portuguese. Our analyses focused on humorous utterances identified by the subsequent presence of laughter. Acoustic features (...) of these utterances were compared to non-humorous utterances by the same speakers of similar length and immediately preceding them to look for prosodic contrasts. This corpus provided a unique opportunity for examining the way people mark their humorous productions in a non-humorous environment. Contrary to the notion that speakers must mark their production of humor in order to facilitate audience understanding, no significant marking of a joking “frame” was detected across a range of acoustic dimensions. The only consistent difference — that the set-up and punch line segments were louder than baseline speech before it — does not well support a marking hypothesis and more likely reflects speaker adjustments to the acoustic conditions of the meeting hall. We present these data from the perspective of the encryption theory of humor that predicts speakers will not generally mark spontaneous, conversational humor in most contexts. (shrink)

Absolute Delusion, Perfect Buddhahood: The Rise and Fall of a Chinese Heresy. Jamie Hubbard. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu 2001. xvii, 333 pp. Hbk $45.00, pbk $22.92. ISBN 0-8248-2345-1.

Mourning in Late Imperial China. Filial Piety and the State. Norman Kutcher. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999. xiv, 210 pp. £40.00, US $64.95. ISBN 0-521-62439-8.

The Salistamba Sutra, Sanskrit Reconstruction, English Translation, Critical Notes. N Ross Reat. Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1993. xiii, 74 pp. Rs 150. ISBN 81-208-1135-6.