As corporate raids become more prevalent, top corporate executives have asked for and often received additional executive power to ward off raiders or sharks. For example, they have been given the use of shark repellents such as staggered elections for board members, cumulative voting, super majority voting requirements, and the power to sell off the firm's crown jewels. Are they abusing these powers as they attempt to save their jobs, at the expense of stockholders, by driving off the corporate raiders (...) who might unseat ineffective management? In this article the practices being used by entrenched managers to make their firms less attractive to raiders and the defense tactics they are using in corporate takeover battles are examined from an ethical viewpoint. (shrink)

Moral philosophers agree that welfare matters. But they disagree about what it is, or how much it matters. In this vital new work, Wayne Sumner presents an original theory of welfare, investigating its nature and discussing its importance. He considers and rejects all notable theories of welfare, both objective and subjective, including hedonism and theories founded on desire or preference. His own theory connects welfare closely with happiness or life satisfaction. Reacting against the value pluralism that currently dominates moral philosophy, (...) he advances welfare as the only basic ethical value. He concludes by discussing the implications of this thesis for ethical and political theory. Written in clear, non-technical language, and including a definitive survey of other work in this area, Sumner's book is essential reading for moral philosophers, political theorists, and welfare economists. (shrink)

Standpoint theorists have long been clear that marginalization does not make better understanding a given. They have been less clear, though, that social dominance does not make ignorance a given. Indeed, many standpoint theorists have implicitly committed themselves to what I call the strong epistemic disadvantage thesis. According to this thesis, there are strong, substantive limits on what the socially dominant can know about oppression that they do not personally experience. I argue that this thesis is not just implausible but (...) politically pernicious; it is an excuse for ignorance and silence that stifles our ability to address many injustices. Moreover, I argue that if we are to avoid lending support to the SEDT while working within a standpoint theory framework, we must hold that the socially dominant can achieve marginalized standpoints. So, we must hold that men can achieve feminist standpoints, that white women (and men) can achieve black feminist standpoints, and so on. (shrink)

US Supreme Court rulings concerning sanctions for juvenile offenders have drawn on the science of brain development and concluded that adolescents are inherently less mature than adults in ways that render them less culpable. This conclusion departs from arguments made in cases involving the mature minor doctrine, in which teenagers have been portrayed as comparable to adults in their capacity to make medical decisions. I attempt to reconcile these apparently incompatible views of adolescents’ decision-making competence. Adolescents are indeed less mature (...) than adults when making decisions under conditions that are characterized by emotional arousal and peer pressure, but adolescents aged 15 and older are just as mature as adults when emotional arousal is minimized and when they are not under the influence of peers, conditions that typically characterize medical decision-making. The mature minor doctrine, as applied to individuals 15 and older, is thus consistent with recent research on adolescent development. (shrink)

There is an undeniable tendency to dismiss women’s sexual assault allegations out of hand. However, this tendency is not monolithic—allegations that black men have raped white women are often met with deadly seriousness. I argue that contemporary rape culture is characterized by the interplay between rape myths that minimize rape, and myths that catastrophize rape. Together, these two sets of rape myths distort the epistemic resources that people use when assessing rape allegations. These distortions result in the unjust exoneration of (...) people we cannot conceive of as monstrous, while making it too easy to believe that some marginalized people could be rapists. I also argue that rape myths enable a novel kind of epistemic injustice. This injustice concerns how our assessments of trustworthiness and our assessments of plausibility interact. I argue that rape myths can result in runaway credibility deflations that can explain both why people fail to believe most women, and also why people may unjustly believe false allegations that white women have been raped by black men. (shrink)

Standpoint epistemology has been linked with increasing calls for deference to the socially marginalized. As we understand it, deference involves recognizing someone else as better positioned than we are, either to investigate or to answer some question, and then accepting their judgment as our own. We connect contemporary calls for deference to old objections that standpoint epistemology wrongly reifies differences between groups. We also argue that while deferential epistemic norms present themselves as a solution to longstanding injustices, habitual deference prevents (...) the socially dominant from developing for themselves the skills necessary to expand their capacity for empathy, to deftly probe for evidence, and to ask critical questions. Consequently, we argue that standpoint epistemology must be understood as calling for inclusion, not deference. (shrink)

Reporting peers’ counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs) is important for maintaining an ethical organization, but is a significant and potentially risky action. In Bandura’s Theory of Moral Thought and Action (Bandura, 1991) he states that such acts require significant moral agency, which is generated when an individual possesses adequate moral self-regulatory capacities to address the issue and is in a context that activates and reinforces those capacities. Guided by this theory, we assess moral potency (i.e., moral courage, moral efficacy, and moral (...) ownership) as key capacities predicting peer reporting intentions and assess three contextual factors influencing the generation and effects of moral potency: whether a potential informant (1) works for an ethical leader, (2) is embedded in a psychologically safe climate promoting interpersonal risk-taking, and (3) operates in a more normal or extreme context. We assess the proposed model across three field studies entailing both normal and extreme (i.e., firefighting units) contexts. Results show that ethical leaders raise employees’ moral potency, promoting greater willingness to report their peers’ CWBs. In normal work contexts, psychological safety positively moderated both the relationship between ethical leadership and moral potency and between moral potency and peer reporting intentions. However, psychological safety had the opposite effects in more extreme work contexts. Whereas psychological safety strengthens the positive association between moral potency and peer reporting intentions in normal work contexts, in contexts where individuals are more frequently exposed to extreme events, psychological safety weakens this relationship, thus highlighting the unforeseen downsides of psychological safety in extreme contexts. (shrink)

In _Civilization and Its Discontents_, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus 19:18 and then elaborated in Christian teachings, to love one's neighbor as oneself. "Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it," he proposed, "as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment." After the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, Stalinism, and Yugoslavia, Leviticus 19:18 seems (...) even less conceivable—but all the more urgent now—than Freud imagined. In _The Neighbor_, three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how this problem of neighbor-love opens questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and that suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays explore today's central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political. In "Towards a Political Theology of the Neighbor," Kenneth Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt's political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neighbor based in psychoanalysis. In "Miracles Happen," Eric L. Santner extends the book's exploration of neighbor-love through a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Slavoj Žižek's "Neighbors and Other Monsters" reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporary ethical thought. A rich and suggestive account of the interplay between love and hate, self and other, personal and political, _The Neighbor_ will prove to be a touchstone across the humanities and a crucial text for understanding the persistence of political theology in secular modernity. (shrink)

Deception sometimes results in nonconsensual sex. A recent body of literature diagnoses such violations as invalidating consent: the agreement is not morally transformative, which is why the sexual contact is a rights violation. We pursue a different explanation for the wrongs in question: there is valid consent, but it is not consent to the sex act that happened. Semantic conventions play a key role in distinguishing deceptions that result in nonconsensual sex (like stealth condom removal) from those that don’t (like (...) white lies). Our framework is also applicable to more controversial cases, like those implicated in so-called “gender fraud” complaints. (shrink)

Despite a growing body of literature focused on understanding experiences of workplace dignity, attention has centered almost exclusively on employees with lower-level jobs. As a result, little is known about how workplace dignity and indignity are experienced by employees with middle- and upper-level jobs and how their experiences differ from those with lower-level jobs. We address these absences by interviewing employees from a diversity of lower-, middle-, and upper-level jobs about their experiences of indignity at work. We outline common dignity (...) threats, along with typical emotional responses and recourses employees use at each level. We find lower-level employees experience chronic dignity threats from being disrespected, devalued, demeaned, and dehumanized, to which their most typical response is endurance. Middle-level employees experience periodic dignity threats due to undermining of their work, confidence, and reputation. For them, the typical response is strategizing. Finally, on the rare occasions upper-level employees experience dignity threats, it usually is due to a disregard of their special expertise or denial of special rights, to which they respond by rising above. (shrink)

The federal government is funding a sea change in health care by investing in interventions targeting social determinants of health, which are significant contributors to illness and health inequity. This funding power has encouraged states, professional and accreditation organizations, health care entities, and providers to focus heavily on social determinants. We examine how this shift in focus affects clinical practice in the fields of oncology and emergency medicine, and highlight potential areas of reform.

Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) integrated model of production and comprehension includes no explicit role for nonlinguistic cognitive processes. Yet, how domain-general cognitive functions contribute to language processing has become clearer with well-specified theories and supporting data. We therefore believe that their account can benefit by incorporating functions like working memory and cognitive control into a unified model of language processing.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 217-231.

Those who commit sexual assault are rarely brought to justice: for every 1000 rapes, only seven will result in a felony conviction. There are numerous factors that contribute to the fact that sexual assault goes largely unpunished, and legal reform alone is not a sufficient solution—but it is an important part of the solution. In this paper, I develop an account of the epistemic injustice that rape victims face in criminal trials, and I argue that this, at least in part, (...) helps to explain not only why conviction rates are so low, but why previous feminist legal reform has not helped to improve conviction rates. I then argue that more radical legal reform is necessary, and that we ought to consider lowering the standard of evidence in sexual assault cases. (shrink)

While central to the Christian religion, the act of faith has been notoriously difficult to define. This essay is an attempt to illuminate, with the aid of insights from cognitive science and process philosophy, what it means for a Christian to have faith, specifically in God. In doing so, the apriori and aposteriori aspects of faith are explored, along with its connections to science and empirical evidence, revelation, knowledge, doubt, morality, and additional Christian beliefs.

Richard Landau, the longtime editor of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, died on November 3, 2015. Richard grew up in St. Louis. Like many people of his generation, he was inspired to become a physician by Paul de Kruif ’s book Microbe Hunters. Richard went to college and medical school at Washington University in St. Louis and came to the University of Chicago in 1940 as a resident in medicine. Except for a two-year stint in the army during World War (...) II, he spent the rest of his career at the university, rising through the academic ranks to become Professor of Medicine in 1959. Richard held several important administrative positions at the university; he served as Chief of the Section of Endocrinology.. (shrink)

L. Stasyuk «Projection of Humanistic and Reformational reception in Protestant Ortodoxy». There is performed a philosophical and theological reflection of the process in which main subjects of Renaissance and Reformation changes adhere to the principle of getting back to sources such as appeal, thorough rethinking, borrowing of the antique heritage within which a foundation of the Humanism philosophy is laid, as well as to the Holy Scriptures and to the teachings of spiritual and religious leaders of Christianity. There is made (...) a comparative analysis of the attitude to the antique philosophical and medieval scholastic achievements and to the philosophy as a way of thinking generally by representatives of Humanism and Protestant Orthodoxy which typify the spiritual paradigm of European history. (shrink)

The man in the street to-day is aware that recent developments in the physical sciences have necessitated a fundamental revision of the concepts of physics; he finds that Einstein is no less upsetting to his ideas than was Copernicus to those of his own time or than Darwin was to Bishop Wilberforce. The plain man who has “ philosophical leanings ” is aware that questions previously regarded as metaphysical—and about which philosophers have written much that is unintelligible—are now recognized as (...) falling within the scope of physics. Every reader of this Journal is aware that the criticism to which the main concepts of physics—space, time, matter—have been subjected is so fundamental that it is no longer possible to say that there are material bodies in space, which have events happening to them at a given time. We must substitute the conception of a fourfold continuum within which space, time and matter are inextricably involved. Finally, we are told that this new way of regarding the classical trinity suggests the consequence that we know nothing about the “ inner nature ” of the terms with which we deal, we can make no assertions as to the ultimate nature of that to which they may refer. In this respect the prevailing temper of the present-day scientist is to be contrasted with the cocksureness of most nineteenth-century physicists l who, even if they did not go so far as to say “ we know what matter is,” at least suggested that only the metaphysician had, or could have, any doubts as to its nature and reality^. (shrink)

When medical assistance in dying (MAiD) was legalized in Canada in June 2016, the question of allowing decisionally capable persons to make advance requests in anticipation of later incapacity was reserved for further consideration during the mandatory parliamentary review originally scheduled to begin in June 2020 (but since delayed by COVID-19). In its current form the legislation does not permit such requests, since it stipulates that at the time at which the procedure is to be administered the patient must give (...) “express consent” to receiving it. Since express consent presupposes decisional capacity, this requirement rules out administering MAiD to a patient who has lost capacity. Amendments to the legislation passed by Parliament in March 2021 open the door slightly by allowing advance requests by patients after they have been approved for MAiD, if they fear losing capacity before the procedure can be administered. But this provision would apply only to patients whose natural death was deemed to be “reasonably foreseeable”, and would continue to exclude (a) requests made after diagnosis of a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” but in advance of approval for MAiD, and (b) requests made before such a diagnosis. My aim in this paper is twofold: to explore the ethical and legal issues concerning advance requests for MAiD, and to argue for expanding provision for such requests to include both of these further scenarios. (shrink)

Hate speech, understood broadly, is any form of expression intended to arouse hatred or contempt toward members of a particular social group. When university administrators have reason to believe that a planned speaking event on campus may feature hate speech (at least in the eyes of some), how should they respond? In this paper I address this question as it arises for Canadian universities. I argue that, where the regulation of campus speech is concerned, the right course of action for (...) university administrators is nearly always to do absolutely nothing. They will have reason to become actively involved only in order to ensure that a speaking event proceeds safely, or when it threatens to disrupt the functioning of the university, or when it is itself threatened with disruption by protesting groups. In those instances the justification for intervention will be to protect and facilitate speech, not to shut it down. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Rights and Goals Rules, Rights, and Utility Rights and Liberty.

Encoding sensory events entails processing of several physical attributes. Is the processing of any of these attributes a pre-requisite of conscious awareness? This selective review examines a recent set of behavioral and event-related potentials, studies conducted in patients with visual and auditory unilateral neglect or extinction, with the aim of establishing what aspects of initial processing are impaired in these patients. These studies suggest that extinguished visual stimuli excite the sensory cortices, but perhaps to a lesser degree than acknowledged stimuli (...) do. However, encoding spatial attributes of auditory and visual stimuli appear to be preferentially impaired. In light of results from patients with other neuro-behavioral deficits, it is argued that egocentric spatial information is an essential pre-requisite for knowing that an external event occurred. In contrast, information handled by mostly domain-specific circuits, such as in the ventral temporal lobe, supports awareness of the identity of a stimulus, but not of its mere presence. Without spatial information, the stimulus identity will remain implicit. (shrink)

_Purpose._ The purpose of the article lies in studying the main socio-anthropological measurements of the problem of recognition represented primarily by the philosophy of recognition of Alex Honneth, which is actualized by the struggle of the Ukrainian people for their existence and national-cultural recognition. A consistent analysis of the communicative paradigm in contemporary philosophy led to the understanding of its transformation into the reality of the problem of recognition and the identification of the main forms of recognition in it, which (...) determine an individual’s perception of the social space as fair or unfair, where his dignity is disrespected. _Theoretical basis._ Turning to the works of Jurgen Habermas, Otfried Hoeffe, Ernst Tugendhat, Stefan Gosepath, and Thomas Rentsch made it possible to supplement the mainly procedural, theoretical-communicative way of philosophizing with a philosophical-anthropological, existential, contextual principle of awareness of recognition as a fundamental principle of justice and the understanding that the brutal, unjust destruction of the "living world" of a person and the state is synonymous with their physical destruction. The thesis of Francis Fukuyama about the relationship between the desire for recognition and human dignity inherent in human nature has acquired an important theoretical and methodological meaning. _Originality._ The article investigates the modern philosophical discourse of the problem of recognition in the socio-anthropological measurements, in the context of the relationship between recognition, the "living world" and justice, non-recognition, humiliation of human dignity, and injustice. And it was also found that the image of recognition represented by modern philosophical thought, as a horizon and condition of human existence, is based on the following components: justice, solidarity, dignity, and care. Exactly addressing the problem of recognition made it possible to answer the question about the anthropological-ontological, existential meaning of the desire of individuals, nations, and states for recognition and outline the ways of transforming recognition as a variant of "communicative utopia" into a real socio-cultural project. _Conclusions._ In contrast to justice, the theory of recognition comes from asymmetrical human relations, which, in the struggle for recognition, must become symmetrical. Although justice takes precedence over ethics of care and recognition, they are not actually in competition with each other, but belong to different but complementary dimensions of human existence. The perspective of philosophical understanding of the problem of recognition itself requires the deepening of its analysis with an existential-anthropological understanding rooted in a new, tragic life experience. Only under such conditions, it is possible to overcome the gap between often abstract philosophical reflections and real personal and social practices. (shrink)

Both practitioners and scholars are increasingly interested in the idea of the human-centered organization. This term first appeared in the late 1950s and has gained attention in the last ten years. Awareness of the need for human-centeredness grew during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which many organizational leaders were compelled to focus on employee health, safety, and well-being. In this paper, we review and synthesize the rather fragmented scholarly and practitioner literature on human-centered organization (HCO) to develop an integrated definition and (...) framework. The 26 sources reviewed in depth indicate that the HCO construct is primarily utilized in two ways. First, human-centered design scholars and practitioners conceive of HCOs as employing human-centered design practices. The second discourse involves the humanistic management and culture literature, which conceives of HCOs as embodying humanistic values and cultures. After reviewing these separate discourses, we synthesize them in an integrated definition as well as framework of HCO. The framework starts from humanistic values such as dignity, well-being, and justice, which are pivotal in creating organizational practices characterized by a common good purpose, positive human experiences on the job, team structures to coordinate work, and participatory tools and approaches. (shrink)

This article treats religion as a central concern in Whitehead. His view of rational religion relies primarily on rational inference, not direct intuition. Taking seriously in religion the nonreflective elements in human cognition would not jeopardize, but would strengthen, his treatment of the reflective ones. While religion can certainly include vestiges of human savagery, it also promotes the ascent of humanity beyond social decay and enhances the art of life.