No consensus yet exists on how to handle incidental fnd-ings in human subjects research. Yet empirical studies document IFs in a wide range of research studies, where IFs are fndings beyond the aims of the study that are of potential health or reproductive importance to the individual research participant. This paper reports recommendations of a two-year project group funded by NIH to study how to manage IFs in genetic and genomic research, as well as imaging research. We conclude that researchers (...) have an obligation to address the possibility of discovering IFs in their protocol and communications with the IRB, and in their consent forms and communications with research participants. Researchers should establish a pathway for handling IFs and communicate that to the IRB and research participants. We recommend a pathway and categorize IFs into those that must be disclosed to research participants, those that may be disclosed, and those that should not be disclosed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Global multi-stakeholder initiatives are important instruments that have the potential to improve the social and environmental sustainability of global supply chains. However, they often fail to comprehensively address the needs and interests of various supply-chain participants. While voluntary in nature, MSIs have most often been implemented through coercive approaches, resulting in friction among their participants and in systemic problems with decoupling. Additionally, in those cases in which deliberation was constrained between and amongst participants, collaborative approaches have often failed to materialize. (...) Our framework focuses on two key aspects of these breakdowns: assumptions about the orientation of MSI participants, and the deliberation processes that participants use to engage with each other to create these initiatives and sustain them over time. Drawing from stakeholder and deliberation theories, we revisit the concept of MSIs and show how their deliberative capacity may be enhanced in order to encourage participants to collaborate voluntarily. (shrink)

Poor working conditions remain a serious problem in supplier facilities in developing countries. While previous research has explored this from the developed buyers’ side, we examine this phenomenon from the perspective of developing countries’ suppliers and subcontractors. Utilizing qualitative data from a major knitwear exporting cluster in India and a stakeholder management lens, we develop a framework that shows how the assumptions of conventional, buyer-driven voluntary governance break down in the dilution of buyer power and in the web of factors (...) rooted in suppliers’ traditions, beliefs, local demands and resource dependency. We reveal out how success in governing collaborative global supply chains often falls short within the subcontracting stage, where a stakeholder management mindset is elusive to most participants. We suggest that success in governing collaborative global supply chains is dependent on concepts of stakeholder utility and the presence of shared value that is often at odds with the realities of power, information asymmetry and compliance/reward systems inherent in the non-market coordination of global supply chains. Our findings offer important insights for delineating the concepts of value creation from CSR concepts and practices, and for modifying the basic assumptions of conventional supply chain governance. (shrink)

How engineers know, and act on that knowledge, has a profound impact on society. Consequently, the analysis of engineering knowledge is one of the central challenges for the philosophy of engineering. In this article, we present a thematic multidisciplinary conceptual survey of engineering epistemology and identify key areas of research that are still to be comprehensively investigated. Themes are organized based on a survey of engineering epistemology including research from history, sociology, philosophy, design theory, and engineering itself. Five major interrelated (...) themes are identified: the relationship between scientific and engineering knowledge, engineering knowledge as a distinct field of study, the social epistemology of engineering, the relationship between engineering knowledge and its products, and the cognitive aspects of engineering knowledge. We discuss areas of potential future research that are underdeveloped or “undone.”. (shrink)

How engineers know, and act on that knowledge, has a profound impact on society. Consequently, the analysis of engineering knowledge is one of the central challenges for the philosophy of engineering. In this article, we present a thematic multidisciplinary conceptual survey of engineering epistemology and identify key areas of research that are still to be comprehensively investigated. Themes are organized based on a survey of engineering epistemology including research from history, sociology, philosophy, design theory, and engineering itself. Five major interrelated (...) themes are identified: the relationship between scientific and engineering knowledge, engineering knowledge as a distinct field of study, the social epistemology of engineering, the relationship between engineering knowledge and its products, and the cognitive aspects of engineering knowledge. We discuss areas of potential future research that are underdeveloped or “undone.”. (shrink)

In her recent work, Nancy Folbre undertakes an ambitious effort: constructing an intersectional political economy that aims to identify the common mechanisms and logic underpinning the many wrongs that characterise capitalism. In this paper, we focus on what we deem the three fundamental theoretical pillars of her approach. First, she challenges the oppression/exploitation distinction within Marxian political economy and proposes a broader definition of exploitation that can take manifold forms. Second, she questions the Marxian concept of class, and emphasises the (...) variety of forms of subordination and exploitation related to social identities that cannot be reduced to Marxian classes. Finally, she advocates a more comprehensive notion of the economy beyond a focus on capitalist relations of production. It is difficult to understate the theoretical relevance of these claims, which highlight the importance of various contemporary forms of injustice—of which the exploitation of workers by capitalists is only one. As a complement to the Marxian theory of exploitation and class, Folbre’s approach would broaden our understanding of oppressive social relations. Yet as an alternative to Marxian political economy, it is ultimately unconvincing: a shift of emphasis to ‘manifold exploitations’, social groups, and the economy does not yield a gain in analytical insight but rather an impoverishment of our conceptual toolbox. The struggle against capitalism is different from the struggle against patriarchy and racism, even if the ultimate aim should be the removal of all structures of oppression and domination. (shrink)

This paper surveys the state-of-the-art in machine ethics, that is, considerations of how to implement ethical behaviour in robots, unmanned autonomous vehicles, or software systems. The emphasis is on covering the breadth of ethical theories being considered by implementors, as well as the implementation techniques being used. There is no consensus on which ethical theory is best suited for any particular domain, nor is there any agreement on which technique is best placed to implement a particular theory. Another unresolved problem (...) in these implementations of ethical theories is how to objectively validate the implementations. The paper discusses the dilemmas being used as validating ‘whetstones’ and whether any alternative validation mechanism exists. Finally, it speculates that an intermediate step of creating domain-specific ethics might be a possible stepping stone towards creating machines that exhibit ethical behaviour. (shrink)

During the 1980s and 1990s, the debate on the Marxist theory of history centred largely around the work of Robert Brenner’s property-relations-centred construal of it, and G.A. Cohen’s attempt to revive the classical, determinist argument. This article examines two influential arguments by Erik Wright and his colleagues, and by Alan Carling, which acknowledge important weaknesses in Cohen’s work, but which also try to construct a more plausible version of his theory. I show that the attempts to rescue Cohen are largely (...) unsuccessful. And, to the extent that they render the argument plausible, they do so at the cost of turning it, willy-nilly, into a kind of class-struggle theory. I conclude that this spells the demise of the classical version of historical materialism, but also observe that this does not leave us with a voluntaristic understanding of history, as some of its defenders fear. (shrink)

This article is a step towards a rethinking of the emergence of the modern state in Europe. Traditionally, war has been viewed as the central mechanism of state formation. This approach claims that war caused the emergence of the modern state in two significant ways: 1) by consolidating the politically fragmented world of the middle ages through conquest; and 2) through the pressure of competition in a Darwinian international system, which forced the polities of Europe to create the bureaucratic structures (...) fundamental to the authority of the modern state. This article seeks to undermine the first of these mechanisms by showing that the territorial consolidation of Europe was a logical result of dynastic lordship. I seek to show that the consolidation of territory and authority into fewer and fewer hands was a direct consequence of dynastic successional practices and therefore that the emphasis on coercion in European political development has been overplayed. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to resolve the Frierson-Grenberg debate on the nature of Kant’s account of moral motivation that took place in the third issue of Con-textos Kantianos. In their respective interpretations, Frierson and Grenberg fail to accommodate the a priori status of moral feeling when incorporating it into Kant’s moral motivational structure. In response, I provide a novel transcendental interpretation – one that takes the a priori moral feeling both as an incentive of morality and as that which (...) conditions the possibility of morality in human agents. I argue that Kant developed the notion of moral feeling solely in order to resolve the problem of motivational skepticism concerning the moral law. Since this problem occurs as a part of Kant’s search for the supreme principle of morality, the notion of moral feeling becomes a part of both Kant’s moral motivational structure and his argument to justify the moral law. (shrink)

This article discusses the importance of ‘public conscience’ in B. R. Ambedkar’s political thought. Ambedkar consistently defended public conscience as a democratic value in his writings and speeches. Public conscience referred to collective responsibility, social justice and the public deliberation of what constitutes the social good. Ambedkar consistently expressed the unequivocal belief that public conscience would bring about a moral transformation in Indian society through a collective ethical stance against all forms of social oppression. He conceptualized public conscience as a (...) method by which a democratic and ethical Indian society could come about and flourish. This article interrogates his ideas concerning public conscience through a detailed reading of his works, focusing particularly on his 1943 speech, Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah. (shrink)

In their discussion paper of November 2020, Cooket alpresent a draft protocol for navigating circumstances in which emergency services are overwhelmed. Their paper suggests that COVID-related triage decisions should be based on clinical assessment, patient and family consultation, and a range of ethical considerations. In this response, we note that the protocol exhibits an ambiguity that is likely to result in irresolvable dilemmas when put into practice. This ambiguity is exemplified in the paper’s prime ethical imperative (to ‘save more lives (...) and more years of life’), which takes the form of an undefined conjunction whose practical implications are left unspecified. We see this ambiguity in the prime imperative as one manifestation of a broader set of tensions in the protocol. We show that the discipline of human rights provides an essential supplement to the ethical framework on which Cook and colleagues rely, providing a framework for understanding and working through triage dilemmas involving age, discrimination and equality. (shrink)

A challenge to Kant’s less known duty of self-knowledge comes from his own firm view that it is impossible to know oneself. This paper resolves this problem by considering the duty of self-knowledge as involving the pursuit of knowledge of oneself as one appears in the empirical world. First, I argue that, although Kant places severe restrictions on the possibility of knowing oneself as one is, he admits the possibility of knowing oneself as one appears using methods from empirical anthropology. (...) Second, I show that empirical knowledge of oneself is fairly reliable and is, in fact, considered as morally significant from Kant’s moral anthropological perspective. Taking these points together, I conclude that Kant’s duty of self-knowledge exclusively entails the pursuit of empirical self-knowledge. (shrink)

Bortolotti’s Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs defends the view that delusions are beliefs on a continuum with other beliefs. A different view is that delusions are more like illusions, that is, they arise from faulty perception. This view, which is not targeted by the book, makes it easier to explain why delusions are so alien and disabling but needs to appeal to forensic aspects of functioning.

Articles on Sikh ethos, history, and philosophy.

Although there is such a thing as Indian thought, it seems to play no role in the way social sciences and philosophy are practiced in India or elsewhere. The problem is not only that we no longer employ terms such as atman, avidya, dharma to reflect on our experience; the terms that we do indeed use—sovereignty, secularism, rights, civil society and political society, corruption—seem to insulate our experience from our reflection. This paper will outline Gandhi’s framing of our predicament in (...) Hind Swaraj. It will then discuss three very different examples taken from our peculiar life with concepts that will also serve to clarify and illustrate the framework I am outlining. It will then very briefly discuss how Gandhi saw the Gita as showing him a way out of the predicament. (shrink)

Micro RNAs (miRNAs) have been shown to control many cellular processes including developmental timing in different organisms. The prediction that miRNAs are involved in regulating hox genes of flies and mouse is quite a recent idea and is supported by the finding that mir‐196 represses Hoxb8 gene expression. The non‐coding regions that encode these miRNAs are also conserved across species in the same way as other mechanisms that regulate expression of hox genes. On the contrary, until now no homeotic phenotype, (...) a hallmark of any hox gene mutation, had been associated with any hox miRNA. Recent work on bithorax complex miRNA (miR–iab‐4–5p) shows, for the first time, that miRNAs can lead to homeotic transformation. This miRNA regulates Ultrabithorax (Ubx) and results in the transformation of haltere to wing.1 This study unveils a new complexity and finesse to the regulation of hox gene expression pattern that is needed for determining the anteroposterior body axis in all bilaterians. BioEssays 28: 445–448, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The framing problematic of this dissertation is the political and epistemological relationship between metropolitan theory and post-colonial narrative. By providing multiple determinations to that problematic, I seek to situate the inventions of post-colonial identity. Using "detour" both as a privileged figure of contemporary theory and as the lived socio-historical experience of post-colonials, I examine the theoretical and political consequences using the former to translate the latter. Placing my own discourse at the limits of theory, I show that the predicament in (...) which contemporary theory finds itself is a result of the reduction of narrative to theory . ;I stage the negotiation between metropolitan theory and post-colonial narratives as an allegory of the post-colonial predicament. Finally, through a critique of certain post-colonial theorists , I plot the limits of the post-colonial space in the First World. I conclude that to invent the post-colonial space as a signifying space, we need to develop a poetics of retour which will be as complex and as ambiguous as the poetics of detour that the post-colonials have been living, narrating, and theorizing. ;Chapter I sets the theoretical context for posing the problem of post-colonial self-fashioning. In Chapter II, I sketch the trajectory of post-colonial detour through a close reading of V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men. In Chapter III, I interrogate Homi Bhabha's theory of cultural hybridity as a version of the poetics of detour. In Chapter IV, I offer a characterization of the predicament of theory. In the final chapter, I discuss the uses of theory by post-colonial intellectuals and offer a critique of their politics of cultural description and self-description. I argue that post-colonial theorists have evaded the question of inventing the post-colonial space as a signifying space by rewriting the narrative of their detour as a narrative of diplacement, as immigritude. (shrink)

For computer simulation models to usefully inform climate risk management, uncertainties in model projections must be explored and characterized. Because doing so requires running the model many ti...

Can mandated adoption of corporate social responsibility (CSR) improve firm value? Most CSR adoption is purely voluntary. However, governments regularly encourage CSR adoption with soft regulations that vary from simply endorsing and symbolically supporting CSR to requiring the adoption of specific practices. Governments have resisted fully mandating CSR because there is some concern universally that mandated CSR may reduce firm value. There is, however, no empirical clarity as to whether mandated CSR impedes or improves firm value. We address this uncertainty (...) by analyzing the effects of the mandated adoption of CSR that the government of India legislated in 2014. Drawing on a sample of 1,526 publicly traded firms and deploying a combinative analytical framework comprising an event study, regression discontinuity design, and a difference-in-differences technique, we conclude that India’s CSR mandate did, in fact, increase value for all firms bound by the mandate. This value-enhancing effect was greater for foreign firms relative to domestic firms. Our results refute previous research showing that India’s CSR mandate diminished firm value. (shrink)

Kant’s theory of moral action faces a serious difficulty concerning motivation: how do commands of pure practical reason solely move human agents to perform moral actions? In his response, Kant claims that human agents perform moral actions out of a feeling of respect for the moral law. However, attempts to accommodate a feeling of respect into Kant’s rigorously rationalist ethical theory have led to two diverging strands of interpretation in the secondary literature: intellectualism and affectivism. Against this context, this paper (...) proposes an interpretation of Kantian moral motivation with an appropriate place for the notion of respect within it to resolve the motivational problem concerning moral actions. According to the model of Kantian moral motivation that this paper develops, motivation to act morally takes place in two sequential stages, each involving the positive role of respect as a motive. By arguing for a positive role of the feeling of respect in the process of moral motivation, this model aligns with the affectivist school of interpretation. (shrink)

The main objective of my dissertation is twofold: (i) to investigate how the problem of moral motivation occurs in Kant’s texts, and (ii) to examine how Kant’s account of moral feeling serves as an appropriate solution to it. First, I argue that the problem of moral motivation occurs in Kant’s texts as a skeptical problem concerning the motivational efficacy of practical reason. My view that this problem is integral to Kant’s main ethical project goes against a scholarly trend that dismisses (...) the philosophical significance of motivational skepticism in Kant’s moral theory. Second, I argue that Kant develops a peculiar notion of moral feeling in his Critique of Practical Reason primarily to resolve the problem of motivational skepticism about pure practical reason. In doing so, I regard the notion of moral feeling as an essential component of both Kant’s moral motivational structure and his justification of the moral law. This inclusion of moral feeling makes my interpretation a better alternative not only to standard transcendental interpretations of Kant’s account of moral motivation, but also to other kinds of interpretations proposed in the recent literature. (shrink)

Between 1983 and 2006 there were two distinct sorts of historical writings on Southeast Asian medical history, with quite different emphases. Some historians focused on the history of medicine in national contexts—a practice that resulted in the neglect of larger socioeconomic factors such as migration—that affected the trajectory of pandemics. At the same time, pursuing a different line of thinking, another group of historians focused on the history of specific diseases from a demographic perspective. These two approaches led to very (...) different conclusions about the nature of epidemic disease and pandemics that have beset the region since the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, regional histories of health are neglected in Southeast Asian medical history in favor of either local, national, or global histories. In this essay, I argue that if historians of global health have forsaken the region in favor of the wider world, Southeast Asian historians have neglected the region in favor of the nation. What is missing in Southeast Asian medical history is a regional perspective that would help understand the ways in which pandemic responses are shaped by colonial, Cold War, or national concerns. Beginning 2019, some historians and political analysts trying to understand global pandemics have adopted a regional approach by treating, as a monolithic group, the ASEAN—the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which is a regional grouping of Southeast Asian member states, established in 1967. By contrast, others explore specific geographic, political, or economic issues that have contributed to either the spread or containment of disease. In this regard, the COVID-19 crisis in Southeast Asia merits historical attention to comprehend the strengths and weaknesses of a regional approach. (shrink)

Adequate reprogramming of cellular metabolism in response to stresses or suboptimal growth conditions involves a myriad of coordinated changes that serve to promote cell survival. As protein synthesis is an energetically expensive process, its regulation under stress is of critical importance. Reprogramming of messenger RNA (mRNA) translation involves well‐understood stress‐activated kinases that target components of translation initiation machinery, resulting in the robust inhibition of general translation and promotion of the translation of stress‐responsive proteins. Translational arrest of mRNAs also results in (...) the accumulation of transcripts in cytoplasmic foci called stress granules. Recent studies focus on the key roles of transfer RNA (tRNA) in stress‐induced translational reprogramming. These include stress‐specific regulation of tRNA pools, codon‐biased translation influenced by tRNA modifications, tRNA miscoding, and tRNA cleavage. In combination, signal transduction pathways and tRNA metabolism changes regulate translation during stress, resulting in adaptation and cell survival. This review examines molecular mechanisms that regulate protein synthesis in response to stress. (shrink)

I take friendship to be a practical and emotional relationship marked by mutual and (more-or-less) equal goodwill, liking, and pleasure. Friendship can exist between siblings, lovers, parent and adult child, as well as between otherwise unrelated people. Some friendships are valued chiefly for their usefulness. Such friendships are instrumental or means friendships. Other friendships are valued chiefly for their own sakes. Such friendships are noninstrumental or end friendships. In this paper I am concerned only with end friendships, and the challenge (...) they pose to consequentialism. In an end friendship, one loves the friend as an essential part of one's system of ends, and not solely, or even primarily, as a means to an independent end - career advancement, amusement, philosophical illumination, or greater happiness in the universe. In such love, one loves the friend for the person she is, i.e., for her essential rather than incidental features. These include both her character traits - the fundamental intellectual, psychological, moral, and aesthetic qualities that constitute an individual's personality - and her unique perspective on herself and others: her view of the important and unimportant, her interest in herself and others. Thus in end friendship the friend cannot be replaced by another, for no other can have her essential features. Nor can she be replaced by a more efficient means to one's ends, or abandoned on their achievement, for it is not as a means that one 2 loves her. It is this necessary irreplaceability that most obviously marks off end friendship from means or instrumental friendship, in which the friend is replaceable.i Hence to love a friend as an end is to place a special value on her - to believe that her value is not outweighed, say, simply by the greater needs of others - or the needs of a greater number of others ("Sorry dear, there are more drowning on this end").ii End friendship (hereafter simply "friendship") is a cardinal human value.. (shrink)

In the moral philosophy of the last two centuries, altruism of one kind or another has typically been regarded as identical with moral concern. When self-regarding duties have been recognized, motivation by duty has been sharply distinguished from motivation by self-interest . Accordingly, from Kant, Mill, and Sidgwick to Rawls, Nagel, and Gauthier, concern for our own interests, whether long-term or short-term, has typically been regarded as intrinsically nonmoral. So, for example, although Thomas Nagel regards both prudence and altruism as (...) structural features of practical reason, he identifies only the latter as a moral capacity, prudence being merely rational, long-term egoism. Similarly, John Ravvls and David Gauthier contrast self-interest and other nontuistic interests—interests that are independent of others' interests—with moral interest. We are morally permitted , no doubt, to act out of self-interest within certain constraints, but such acts can have no intrinsic moral worth. Pursuit of our own interests out of duty does have intrinsic moral worth, but such pursuit, by hypothesis, cannot be motivated by self-interest. Self-interested pursuit of our own interests as such, no matter how realistic, farsighted, temperate, honest, or courageous, cannot be intrinsically moral. And this remains the case even if self-interest motivates us to perform other-regarding acts: only those other-regarding acts that are motivated by others' interests count as moral, because only such acts are altruistic. (shrink)

The precautionary principle justifies postponing the implementation of development projects to await better information about their environmental impacts. But if implementation capacity is congestible, as is often the case in practical settings, a postponed project may have to vie for implementation priority with projects that arrive later. Limitations of implementation capacity create two risks. First, it may sometimes not make sense to go back to a postponed project, even if it is later revealed to be a good one. Second, the (...) planner may find it worthwhile to go back to it, but at the expense of undesirable delay of subsequent projects. We consider a planner facing a sequence of projects that vary stochastically in their (1) importance and (2) improvability, but knowing that implementation capacity is congestible. The scope for congestion implies a ‘bonus’ for earlier-than-otherwise decisions, in common parlance ‘keeping the desk clear’, which works against the well-understood option value that encourages postponement. The optimal decision rule depends upon the stochastic environment whereby future projects are generated, in ways that are not obvious. The value of the bonus is increasing in the expected importance of future projects but decreasing in their expected improvability. Higher variability of the importance of projects, in the sense of mean-preserving spread, increases the size of the bonus, but variability in their improvability has a generally ambiguous impact. We characterize the adjusted decision rule and note its implications for the conduct of cost-benefit informed policy. (shrink)

Identifying the determinants of reproductive success in small-scale societies is critical for understanding how natural selection has shaped human evolution and behavior. The available evidence suggests that status-accruing behaviors such as hunting and prosociality are pathways to reproductive success, but social egalitarianism may diminish this pathway. Here we introduce a mixed longitudinal/cross-sectional dataset based on 45 years of research with the Batek, a population of egalitarian rain forest hunter-gatherers in Peninsular Malaysia, and use it to test the effects of four (...) predictors of lifetime reproductive success: foraging return rate, sharing proclivity, cooperative foraging tendency, and kin presence. We found that none of these factors can explain variation in lifetime reproduction among males or females. We suggest that social egalitarianism, combined with strikingly low infant and juvenile mortality rates, can mediate the pathway between foraging, status-accruing behavior, and reproductive success. Our approach advocates for greater theoretical and empirical attention to quantitative social network measures, female foraging, and fitness outcomes. (shrink)

When teaching a novel mathematical concept, should we present learners with abstract or concrete examples? In this experiment, we conduct a critical replication and extension of a well‐known study that argued for the general advantage of abstract examples (Kaminski, Sloutsky, & Heckler, 2008a). We demonstrate that theoretically motivated yet minor modifications of the learning design put this argument in question. A key finding from this study is that participants who trained with improved concrete examples performed as well as, or better (...) than, participants who trained with abstract examples. We argue that the previously reported “advantage of abstract examples” manifested not because abstract examples are advantageous in general, but because the concrete condition employed suboptimal examples. (shrink)

When learning a new math concept, should learners be first taught the concept and its associated procedures and then solve problems, or solve problems first even if it leads to failure and then be taught the concept and the procedures? Two randomized-controlled studies found that both methods lead to high levels of procedural knowledge. However, students who engaged in problem solving before being taught demonstrated significantly greater conceptual understanding and ability to transfer to novel problems than those who were taught (...) first. The second study further showed that when given an opportunity to learn from the failed problem-solving attempts of their peers, students outperformed those who were taught first, but not those who engaged in problem solving first. Process findings showed that the number of student-generated solutions significantly predicted learning outcomes. These results challenge the conventional practice of direct instruction to teach new math concepts and procedures, and propose the possibility of learning from one's own failed problem-solving attempts or those of others before receiving instruction as alternatives for better math learning. (shrink)

This book offers a new argument for the ancient claim that well-being as the highest prudential good -- eudaimonia -- consists of happiness in a life according to virtue. Virtue is a source of happiness, but happiness also requires external goods.

Introduction: The Nature and Signif1cance of Friendship Neera Kapur Badhwar Philosophers have long recognized that friendship plays a central role in a ...

Global supply chains enhance value, but are subject to governance problems and encourage evasive practices that deter sustainability, especially in developing countries. This article proposes that the precontractual environment, where parties are interested in trade but have not yet negotiated formal terms, can enable a unique process for building long-term sustainable relations. We argue that precontractual signals based on relation-specific investments, promises of repeated exchange, and reassuring cheap talk can be leveraged in precontract by the power of framing. We show (...) how these framing signals are amplified in precontract because the lack of credible information, minimal time for reflection, and the role of risk-aversion present in supply chain contract negotiations. The result is a process that is uniquely productive for building long-term and value-generating contractual relations in supply chains, particularly in skeptical or even hostile negotiating contexts. We then show how framed precontractual signals generate a joint contractual surplus through a supernormal profit known as a relational rent. This rent can be invested to improve sustainable practices, an efficient option in a competitive market due to the second order effects that sustainable practices generate. This novel process we propose thus potentially generates superior returns to other trust measures and encourages focus on precontract as a fertile environment for building sustainable investments. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research is currently published by International Phenomenological Society.

This study examines how meritocracy as a collective social imaginary promoting social justice and fairness reproduces class and caste inequalities and fosters ethical violence. We interrogate discourse of merit in the narratives of the professional–managerial class-in-making at an Indian business school. Empirically, we draw on interviews, full-text responses to a qualitative questionnaire, and a student’s poem. We describe how business school students articulate merit as a neoliberal ethic, emphasizing prudential, enterprising attitudes, and responsibility. However, this positive, aspirational façade of merit (...) masks practices of ethical violence, wherein individuals invoke an ethical principle as grounds for moral condemnation and linguistic injuries. These practices of ethical violence desubjectify disadvantaged students and result in silence as a form of inequality. We contribute to organizational research on inequalities by foregrounding ethical violence and desubjectification. We detail the possibilities of discursive agency in contesting and interrupting ethical violence. (shrink)

In the moral philosophy of the last two centuries, altruism of one kind or another has typically been regarded as identical with moral concern. When self-regarding duties have been recognized, motivation by duty has been sharply distinguished from motivation by self-interest. I think this view is wrong: self-interest can be the motive of a moral act. My chief concern is to argue that self-interested action -- i.e., action motivated by rational self-interest -- can be moral, but the data I use (...) to argue for this also provide compelling empirical evidence that all human motives do not reduce to self-interest, that altruism is possible. (shrink)