Originally published in 1976 Talking About Welfare is a collection of essays providing a general survey of the problems facing social welfare. The book introduces a number of philosophers, social workers and social administrators, concentrating on problems in describing a general philosophical orientation to social work, what it means to understand another person, and to problems in describing and justifying social work and social welfare activity. The essays collected contribute to discussion of a wide range of welfare issues, principally that (...) of personal and social welfare, the moral justification of welfare provision, and conceptions of community. (shrink)

Living organisms are the ultimate survivalists, having evolved phenotypes with unprecedented adaptability, ingenuity, resourcefulness, and versatility compared to human technology. To harness these properties, functional descriptions and design principles from all sources of biodiversity information must be collated − including the hundreds of thousands of possible survival features manifest in natural history museum collections, which represent 12% of total global biodiversity. This requires a consortium of expert biologists from a range of disciplines to convert the observations, data, and hypotheses into (...) the language of engineering. We hope to unite multidisciplinary biologists and natural history museum scientists to maximize the coverage of observations, descriptions, and hypotheses relating to adaptation and function across biodiversity, to make it technologically useful. This is to be achieved by developments in meta‐ taxonomic classification, phylogenetics, systematics, biological materials research, structure and morphological characterizations, and ecological data gathering from the collections − the aim being to identify and catalogue features essential for good biomimetic design. (shrink)

Legal systems often rule that people own objects in their territory. We propose that an early-developing ability to make territory-based inferences of ownership helps children address informational demands presented by ownership. Across 6 experiments (N = 504), we show that these inferences develop between ages 3 and 5 and stem from two aspects of the psychology of ownership. First, we find that a basic ability to infer that people own objects in their territory is already present at age 3 (Experiment (...) 1). Children even make these inferences when the territory owner unintentionally acquired the objects and was unaware of them (Experiments 2 and 3). Second, we find that between ages 3 and 5, children come to consider past events in these judgments. They move from solely considering the current location of an object in territory-based inferences, to also considering and possibly inferring where it originated (Experiments 4 to 6). Together, these findings suggest that territory-based inferences of ownership are unlikely to be constructions of the law. Instead, they may reflect basic intuitions about ownership that operate from early in development. (shrink)

Hoerl & McCormack suggest that saving tools does not require temporal reasoning. However, we identify a class of objects that are only possessed in anticipation of future needs. We propose that investigating these future-oriented objects may help identify temporal reasoning in populations where this ability is uncertain.

We review both the aspects of values-related research that complicate ideations of what we ought to do, as well as the psychological impediments to forming beliefs about the way things are. We find that more traditional moral theories are without solid empirical footing in the psychology of human values. Consequently, we revise the notion of values to align with their socially symbolic utility in self-affirmation and reformulate our understandings of moral agency to allow for the practicalities of context, circumstance, and (...) connectedness. We close by discussing the research and practical implications for these revisions. (shrink)

We re-examine the construct of Moral Hypocrisy from the perspective of normative self-interest. Arguing that some degree of self-interest is culturally acceptable and indeed expected, we postulate that a pattern of behavior is more indicative of moral hypocrisy than a single action. Contrary to previous findings, our results indicate that a significant majority of subjects exhibited fair behavior, and that ideals of caring and fairness, when measured in context of the scenario, were predictive of those behaviors. Moreover, measures of Individualism/Collectivism (...) appear more predictive of self-interested behavior than out-of-context responses to moral ideals. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Abstract:By combining normative philosophy and empirical social science, we craft a research framework for assessing differential expectations embodied in normative conceptions of the economic social contract in the United States. We argue that there are distinct views of such a contract grounded in individualist and communitarian philosophical ideologies. We apply this framework to organizational downsizing, postulating that certain human resource practices, in combination with the respective ideological orientations, will affect perceptions of the justice of downsizing policies.

We test conformity-related values applying the value-pragmatics hypothesis by evaluating how personal values related to compliance moderate the relationships between situational factors and unethical decisions. We examine the direct and indirect effects of the values of traditionalism, conformity, and stimulation, as they combine with the situational factors of rewards and punishments in the person–situation interaction model. We find strong support for the value-pragmatics view of ethical decision making and further build support for the person–situation interaction model.

Ethical approval must be obtained before medical research can start. We describe the differences in EA for an pseudonymous, non-interventional, observational European study. Sixteen European national coordinators of the international study on very old intensive care patients answered an online questionnaire concerning their experience getting EA. N = 8/16 of the NCs could apply at one single national ethical committee, while the others had to apply to various regional ECs and/or individual hospital institutional research boards. The time between applying for (...) EA and the first decision varied between 7 days and 300 days. In 9/16 informed consent from the patient was not deemed necessary; in 7/16 informed consent was required from the patient or relatives. The upload of coded data to a central database required additional information in 14/16. In 4/16 the NCs had to ask separate approval to keep a subject identification code list to de-pseudonymize the patients if questions would occur. Only 2/16 of the NCs agreed that informed consent was necessary for this observational study. Overall, 6/16 of the NCs were satisfied with the entire process and 8/16 were unsatisfied. 11/16 would welcome a European central EC that would judge observational studies for all European countries. Variations in the process and prolonged time needed to get EA for observational studies hampers inclusion of patients in some European countries. This might have a negative influence on the external validity. Further harmonization of ethical approval process across Europe is welcomed for low-risk observational studies. Getting ethical approval for low-risk, non-interventional, observational studies varies enormously across European countries. (shrink)

The underrepresentation of females in mathematics-related fields may be explained by gender differences in mathematics self-concept (rather than ability) favoring males. Mathematics self-concept typically declines with student age, differs with student ethnicity, and is sensitive to teacher influence in early schooling. We investigated whether change in mathematics self-concept occurred within the context of a longitudinal intervention to raise and sustain teacher expectations of student achievement. This experimental study was conducted with a large sample of New Zealand primary school students and (...) their teachers. Data were analyzed using longitudinal multilevel modelling with mathematics self-concept as the dependent variable and time (which represents students’ increasing age each year), gender, and ethnicity entered as predictors and achievement in mathematics included as a control variable. Interaction terms were also explored to investigate changes over time for different groups. All students demonstrated a small increase in mathematics self-concept over the three-year period of the current study but mathematics self-concept was consistently greater for boys than girls. Māori, Asian, and Other students’ initial mathematics self-concept was higher than that of New Zealand European and Pacific Islanders’ (after controlling for achievement differences). However, a statistically significant decline in mathematics self-concept occurred for Māori students alone by the end of the study. The expected age-related reduction over time in student mathematics self-concept appeared to be mitigated in association with the longitudinal study. Nevertheless, the demonstration of a comparatively lower mathematics self-concept remained for girls overall and declined for Māori. Our results reinforce implications for future research into mathematics self-concept as a possible determinant of female student career choices. (shrink)

Literature addressing organizational ethical behavior has focused intensely on cognitive moral development, and more recently the automatic and natural moral inclinations. Research addressing the incapacity for moral reasoning, such as psychopathy, is rarely addressed in organizational behavior. Our first aim is to develop a construct definition for functional psychopathy that is appropriate for organizational science and theoretically consistent with the extensive previous clinical and criminal research in this field. Second, we apply two versions of a scale not previously used in (...) business research relative to moral judgments. This scale is a self-reported measure of functional psychopathy and is useful for its relationships with ethically relevant business decisions. Further, we examine which factors emerge as having the highest relationship with ethical decision making. Third, we seek to advance the usefulness of this construct by more precisely placing psychopathy within its nomological network. With these goals in mind, a combined sample of business school seniors participated in three studies. Findings indicate a significant influence of psychopathy over a range of ethically relevant business decisions, as well as negative correlations with factors of the Moral Approbation and the Moral Awareness scales. We conclude with directions for future research and considerations for practice. (shrink)

Within this 1963 text, Professor Watson writes as a physicist seeking to understand how it is that physics goes on at an ever increasing pace to reveal new ...

Introducing students to the core philosophical issues surrounding modern physics and the ideas, which have shaped our current understanding of the subject, the book is based on lectures by H. W. Watson and sets out to illuminate and implicate the inextricably entwined nature of philosophy and physics and the importance of logic.

Although social contracts theory has been applied to organizations (Donaldson & Dunfee, 1994), rarely has the theory been tested empirically. This article uses the traditions of communitarianism and individualism to instantiate an ideal-type economic social contract. We asked 269 subjects to complete the Ideological Orientation Scale and to make judgments on eight downsizing scenarios. Using social judgment theory, we assess the direct and indirect influences of ideology on judgments of fairness. Our findings suggest that ideology indeed shapes individual’s conceptions of (...) organizational fairness. (shrink)

A collection of essays by friends, students, and colleagues on Max Wartofsky's 65th birthday. Reflecting Wartofsky's own interests, topics discussed in this text range from the arts and sciences, to ethics and history, from the Enlightenment, through the 19th century to the present day.

We posit that the weight a person assigns a moral principle is not stable between ideal, or un-contextual assessments and the weight the same moral principle is allocated when applied in a contextual dilemma. Second, we postulate that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior or judgment. Results indicate that the importance of moral principles is dynamic and that patterned moral behavior is a significant predictor of moral judgments.