We use the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to assess the reputational risks created by political investment opportunities that allow managers to spend unlimited and potentially undisclosed firm resources on independent political expenditures. This new opportunity raises important ethical questions, as it is difficult, and perhaps impossible, under current law for shareholders to hold managers accountable for this investment choice and the reputational risks it entails. Using firms’ known political activity as a proxy for (...) managers’ likely future use of independent political expenditures, we examine how market participants reacted to Citizens United, conditional on this prior activity and corporate governance attributes related to the concentration of decision rights in senior management and blockholders. The results of our analyses document that firms with both a high level of known political activity and CEO-chairperson of the board duality experienced negative abnormal returns in reaction to Citizens United. In contrast, firms with concentrated ownership experienced positive abnormal returns; however, as known political activity increased, investors discounted the benefits of concentrated ownership. These findings suggest that investors expect this expansion of firms’ political investment opportunities to amplify principal-agent problems inherent in corporate political activity. Additionally, our findings provide evidence for those deliberating the mandatory disclosure of firms’ investments in politics as a means of increasing managerial accountability to both shareholders and the public. (shrink)

Lockdowns in Australia have been strict and lengthy. Policy-makers appear to have given the preservation of quantity of lives strong priority over the preservation of quality of lives. But thought-experiments in population ethics suggest that this is not always the right priority. In this paper, I'll discuss both negative impacts on quantity of lives caused by the lockdowns themselves, including an increase in domestic violence, and negative impacts on quality of lives caused by lockdowns, in order to raise the question (...) of whether we each had reason to choose quantity over quality in our own lives in a way that would justify the lockdowns we had. (shrink)

This is Werner S. Pluhar's translation of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urtheilskraft) for Hackett Publications (Indianapolis, Indiana). ISBN 9780872200258 (paperback).

When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? In this article, we approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide arguments that it does and that it does not. The arguments are presented via three considerations: the polity's control over what the state does; the polity's unity; and the influence of individual polity members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for different (...) liberal-democratic states and depends on two underlying considerations: the amount of discretion held by the state's officeholders; the extent to which the democratic procedure is deliberative rather than aggregative. (shrink)

Recognizing that offers of payment to research participants can serve various purposes—reimbursement, compensation, and incentive—helps uncover differences between participants that can justify differential payment of participants within the same study. Participants with different study-related expenses will need different amounts of reimbursement to be restored to their pre-participation financial baseline. Differential compensation can be acceptable when some research participants commit more time or assume greater burdens than others, or if inter-site differences affect the value of compensation. Finally, it may be permissible (...) to offer differential incentive payments if necessary to advance a study’s goals. We encourage investigators and Institutional Review Boards to think not only about whether to offer payment, in what amounts, and for what purpose, but also to consider whether differential payment can help promote the scientific and ethical goals of clinical research. (shrink)

There are many actions that we attribute, at least colloquially, to states. Given their size and influence, states are able to inflict harm far beyond the reach of a single individual. But there is a great deal of unclarity about exactly who is implicated in that kind of harm, and how we should think about responsibility for it. It is a commonplace assumption that democratic publics both authorize and have control over what their states do; that their states act in (...) their name and on their behalf. In Not In Their Name, Holly Lawford-Smith approaches these questions from the perspective of social ontology, asking whether the state is a collective agent, and whether ordinary citizens are members of that agent. If it is, and they are, there’s a clear case for democratic collective culpability. She explores alternative conceptions of the state and of membership in the state; alternative conceptions of collective agency applied to the state; the normative implications of membership in the state; and both culpability (from the inside) and responsibility (from the outside) for what the state does. Ultimately, Lawford-Smith argues for the exculpation of ordinary citizens and the inculpation of those working in public services. (shrink)

Do consumers’ ordinary actions of purchasing certain goods make them complicit in global labour injustice? To establish that they do, two things much be shown. First, it must be established that they are not more than complicit, for example that they are not the principal perpetrators. Second, it must be established that they meet the conditions for complicity on a plausible account. I argue that Kutz’s account faces an objection that makes Lepora and Goodin’s better suited, and defend the idea (...) that consumers are complicit in at least two of the ways distinguished by the latter. In the final section of the paper, I consider whether consumers’ responsibility for complicity in global labour injustice is likely to be as strong as responsibility from another source, namely benefiting from that injustice. (shrink)

Philosophers of science traditionally have ignored the details of scientific research, and the result has often been theories that lack relevance either to science or to philosophy in general. In this volume, leading philosophers of biology discuss the limitations of this tradition and the advantages of the "naturalistic turn"—the idea that the study of science is itself a scientific enterprise and should be conducted accordingly. This innovative book presents candid, informal debates among scholars who examine the benefits and problems of (...) studying science in the same way that scientists study the natural world. Callebaut achieves the effect of face-to-face engagement through separate interviews with participants. Contributors include William Bechtel, Robert Brandon, Richard M. Burian, Donald T. Campbell, Patricia Churchland, Jon Elster, Ronald N. Giere, David L. Hull, Philip Kitcher, Karin Knorr Cetina, Bruno Latour, Richard Levins, Richard C. Lewontin, Elisabeth Lloyd, Helen Longino, Thomas Nickles, Henry C. Plotkin, Robert J. Richards, Alexander Rosenberg, Michael Ruse, Dudley Shapere, Elliott Sober, Ryan Tweney, and William Wimsatt. "Why can't we have both theoretical ecology and natural histories, lovingly done?"—Philip Kitcher "Don't underestimate the arrogance of philosophers!"—Elisabeth Lloyd. (shrink)

The goal of referent tracking is to create an ever-growing pool of data relating to the entities existing in concrete spatiotemporal reality. In the context of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) the relevant concrete entities are not only particular patients but also their parts, diseases, therapies, lesions, and so forth, insofar as these are salient to diagnosis and treatment. Within a referent tracking system, all such entities are referred to directly and explicitly, something which cannot be achieved when familiar concept-based systems (...) are used in what is called “clinical coding”. In this paper we describe the components of a referent tracking system in an informal way and we outline the procedures that would have to be followed by healthcare personnel in using such a system. We argue that the referent tracking paradigm can be introduced with only minor – though nevertheless ontologically important – technical changes to existing EHR infrastructures, but that it will require a radically different mindset on the part of those involved in clinical coding and terminology development from that which has prevailed hitherto. (shrink)

The rest of this essay will contribute to the subversion of that distinction in the history of art, with the awareness that this would no longer be a timely issue in any other historical discipline. I engage in this task because of my sense that critical attention to the formal or rhetorical resonances between objects and the histories of art that inscribe them might provide an answer for the kind of historiographic experimentation that Burke and White have obliquely urged upon (...) the historical profession in general.To be fair, the history of art is not exclusively what it once was: the conservator of elite objects and the preserver of a certain canon of values. A variety of critical challenges to this traditional role have animated the discipline during the last two decades, from the revisionism of feminist and Marxist readings to the interpretive paradigms of semiotics and psychoanalysis, and yet one certainly needs to acknowledge that, for the most part, these challenges have originated outside the confines of art history proper.The metahistorical task of discovering some theme or issue shared by this plurality of re-visions need not necessarily prove unilluminating. The concentration on the gaze as an interpretive principle cuts across a wide sampling of recent theoretical perspectives. Paintings are, after all, meant to be looked at, so it should come as no surprise that the investigation of who or what is presumed to be doing the looking is now viewed as a critically unsettling issue in post-structuralist writings on art. Michael Ann Holly is associate professor and chair of the department of art and art history at the University of Rochester. She is the author of Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History and co-editor, with Norman Bryson and Keith Moxey, of Visual Theory. (shrink)

For all the talk there has been lately about privilege, few have commented on the moral obligations that are associated with having privilege. Those who have commented haven't gone much beyond the idea that the privileged should be conscious of their privilege, should listen to those who don't have it. Here we want to go further, and build an account of the moral obligations of those with a particular kind of privilege: race privilege. In this paper we articulate an understanding (...) of race privilege, say how a person can know when she has it, and argue that a race-privileged person has obligations to offset her privilege. We make concrete suggestions for how she can, at least approximately, do this. We use particular racial group disparities in the United States as our running example throughout the paper, although our conclusions generalize. (shrink)

Big data biology—bioinformatics, computational biology, systems biology (including ‘omics’), and synthetic biology—raises a number of issues for the philosophy of science. This article deals with several such: Is data-intensive biology a new kind of science, presumably post-reductionistic? To what extent is big data biology data-driven? Can data ‘speak for themselves?’ I discuss these issues by way of a reflection on Carl Woese’s worry that “a society that permits biology to become an engineering discipline, that allows that science to slip into (...) the role of changing the living world without trying to understand it, is a danger to itself.” And I argue that scientific perspectivism, a philosophical stance represented prominently by Giere, Van Fraassen, and Wimsatt, according to which science cannot as a matter of principle transcend our human perspective, provides the best resources currently at our disposal to tackle many of the philosophical issues implied in the modeling of complex, multilevel/multiscale phenomena. (shrink)

English Summary: Although most religions claim peace as a goal to pursue, religions have been used as justification for violence again and again. Since September 11th, 2001 the Western and Eastern world has been confronted again with violence in the name of religion. As a fundamentalist understanding of religion is a fruitful basis for war and terror, it is essential to empower the liberal movements in the world religions, to support a peaceful community of people from different cultures and religions. (...) Therefore, it is of central importance for our own religious self-concept how faith and reason can be combined to make it possible to feel at home in our own religion and to welcome a pluralistic society. German description: Obwohl in den meisten Religionen Frieden als anzustrebendes Ziel gilt, wurden Religionen immer wieder zur Legitimation von Gewalt genutzt. Seit den Ereignissen des 11. September 2001 ist die westliche und ostliche Welt erneut konfrontiert mit der Gewalt im Namen der Religion. Insofern ein fundamentalistisches Religionsverstandnis den Nahrboden fur Krieg und Terror bildet, kommt es darauf an, die liberalen Krafte und Stromungen in den Weltreligionen zu starken, um ein friedliches Zusammenleben von Angehorigen verschiedener Kulturen und Religionen zu fordern. Fur das eigene religiose Selbstverstandnis ist daher von zentraler Bedeutung, wie Glaube und Vernunft so aufeinander bezogen werden konnen, dass es moglich ist, sowohl in der eigenen Religion beheimatet zu sein als auch die pluralistische Gesellschaft zu bejahen. Mit Beitragen von Michael Grossmann, Rabeya Muller, Wolfgang Pfuller, Andreas Rossler, Arnulf von Scheliha, Christian Wiese, Hans-Georg Wittig, Werner Zager und Ingo J. Zollich. (shrink)

There are many things that philosophy of biology might be. But, given the existence of a professional philosophy of biology that is arguably a progressive research program and, as such, unrivaled, it makes sense to define philosophy of biology more narrowly than the totality of intersecting concerns biologists and philosophers (let alone other scholars) might have. The reasons for the success of the “new” philosophy of biology remain poorly understood. I reflect on what Dutch and Flemish, and, more generally, European (...) philosophers of biology could do to improve the situation of their discipline locally, regionally, and internationally, paying particular attention to the lessons to be learned from the “Science Wars.”. (shrink)

The paradigm of referent tracking is based on a realist presupposition which rejects so-called negative entities (congenital absent nipple, and the like) as spurious. How, then, can a referent tracking-based Electronic Health Record deal with what are standardly called ‘negative findings’? To answer this question we carried out an analysis of some 748 sentences drawn from patient charts and containing some form of negation. Our analysis shows that to deal with these sentences we need to introduce a new ontological relationship (...) between a particular and a universal, which holds when no instance of the universal has a specific qualified ontological relation with the particular. This relation is found to be able to accommodate nearly all occurrences of negative findings in the examined sample, in ways which involve no reference to negative entities. (shrink)

DieVorlesung über Moralphilosophie aus den 1770er Jahren ist eine wichtige Erläuterung und Ergänzung zur Grundlegung der Metaphysik der Sittenvon 1785. Die Neuedition der so genannten Menzer-Vorlesung präsentiert diese Vorlesung auf dem aktuellen Stand der Forschung. Zugrunde gelegt ist die Nachschrift Kaehler, die seit 1997 zum Kant-Archiv in Marburg gehört. Abgeglichen ist der Text mit mehreren Handschriften des Archivs der Berlin-Bandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Staatsbibliothek Berlin. Ein Anhang mit textkritischem Apparat und Erläuterungen zu Literatur und Personen sowie eine Einleitung (...) von Manfred Kühn erschließen die Vorlesung für alle, die sich für die Kant'sche Philosophie der Ethik interessieren. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:...

The fact that vocabulum appears with far more frequency in Tacitus' texts than in any other author except for the encyclopaedists argues for his idiosyncratic usage of the term. This article argues that imperial discourse, nearly identical in structure and expression to that of the Republic but divorced from Republican connotations, provided an empty site where Roman fantasies of self-definition took strong hold, and that Tacitus uses vocabulum to indicate words and concepts that illustrate this process, particularly with reference to (...) representations of the foreign and the past. Such a discourse was congenial for the concentration of power in the hands of one person, as it no longer expressed the conflicting desires of a community engaged in public affairs, but collectivized the public desire for an image of Roman superiority. Thus Germany and the old Republican past were easily mythologized as what Rome desired to be, but feared it was not. Tacitus' use of vocabulum highlights the words in imperial discourse that betray the gap in the political unconscious between Romans' idea of themselves as masters of the Empire and as slaves to one ruler. Nor does he position himself as an outside observer of this process, but creates an experience of it for the reader through gaps and inconsistencies within his narrative. (shrink)

In Letter 5.8 Pliny shows that in the post-Domitianic era historia has become an impossible genre, both as a vehicle for conventional moral wisdom and because of the authoritative narrative voice it necessitates. The letter's literary strategies of deferral express these problems even as its content appears to argue positively the merits of historia and compare it with those of oratio. Pliny emphasizes the insufficiency of the narrative “I”, suggesting instead the importance of dialogue as the means both toward the (...) ethical reconstruction of post-tyrannical discourse and the literary fame for which Pliny also hopes. (shrink)

It is important to study movement data from individual subjects rather than by averaging data across subjects or trials, because averaged data may follow different laws than those followed by the individual data. This fact can be shown mathematically. In addition, clear assumptions and a thorough understanding of their consequences are a necessary component of any realistic model.

The aim of three studies was to examine the differences between business majors and non-business majors, in their level of implicit and explicit power motivation.It was predicted that there are no differences between these two groups in the general level of power motivation, but that differences exist in the way it is explicitly expressed: through desire for leadership and prominence vs. desire for helping. Results of Study 1 indicated that business majors declared a higher leadership motive and a lower helping (...) motive than non-business majors.Study 2 addressed question whether the above differences in power motivation stem from socialization at the university level or from pre-selection. The relationship between high school students’ academic major preferences and their power motivation was tested. It was found that the more they were business-oriented, the higher their scores were on leadership, and lower on helping scales. In Study 3, business majors and non-business majors completed the same questionnaire as participants in previous studies, as well as performed the IAT. Non-business majors declared stronger explicit helping motive, while business majors expressed stronger prominence and leadership motives. Furthermore, for non-business majors, IAT results could be predicted by their helping score. Implications and possible limitations of the presented results are discussed. (shrink)

Zillmann's mood-management theory has acquired a prominent place in media psychology and makes reliable predictions about people's hedonistically motivated mood regulation via entertainment offerings. However, the full potential for explaining affect regulation through media usage has not been exhausted so far. Therefore, we aim at an integrative view of the field based on empirical findings from communication studies as well as on the background of contemporary theories of mood and emotion. The purpose of this analysis is to argue towards an (...) integrative theoretical perspective which considers both unconscious and conscious/reflected processes of affect regulation through media, supplements the hedonistic motive with other non-hedonistic, instrumental motives of affect regulation, looks at selection behavior as well as at other behavioral and cognitive strategies of affect regulation, and encompasses individual attributes. (shrink)

According to Kant, as far as the realisation of humanity is concerned, man is dependent on knowledge. But which science guarantees him an insight into what it means to be a human being? Philosophy? Anthropology? Philosophical anthropology? This study’s problem-oriented development of the question: ‘What is man?’ deals with the anthropological concepts of Scheler, Plessner, Portmann and Gehlen, drawing on the insights of classical philosophy. The focus of its critique is the biologism that is symptomatic of the failure of the (...) attempt to clarify the nature of man in comparative distinction to the form of existence of the animal. With reference to Herder, who understands man as a linguistic being, this book outlines the first steps on the path to overcoming the programme of modern anthropology through a form of ‘philosophy from language’. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Die bürgerliche Welt" verfügbar.