Behaving ethically depends on the ability to recognize that ethical issues exist, to see from an ethical point of view. This ability to see and respond ethically may be related more to attributes of corporate culture than to attributes of individual employees. Efforts to increase ethical standards and decrease pressure to behave unethically should therefore concentrate on the organization and its culture. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how total quality (TQ) techniques can facilitate the development of a (...) cooperative corporate culture that promotes and encourages ethical behavior throughout an organization. (shrink)

A physical basis for the minimal time-energy uncertainty relation is formulated from basic high-energy hadronic properties such as the resonance mass spectrum, the form factor behavior, and the peculiarities of Feynman's parton picture. It is shown that the covariant oscillator formalism combines covariantly this time-energy uncertainty relation with Heisenberg's space-momentum uncertainty relation. A pictorial method is developed to describe the spacetime distribution of the localized probability density.

When Einstein formulated his special relativity, he developed his dynamics for point particles. Of course, many valiant efforts have been made to extend his relativity to rigid bodies, but this subject is forgotten in history. This is largely because of the emergence of quantum mechanics with wave-particle duality. Instead of Lorentz-boosting rigid bodies, we now boost waves and have to deal with Lorentz transformations of waves. We now have some nderstanding of plane waves or running waves in the covariant picture, (...) but we do not yet have a clear picture of standing waves. In this report, we show that there is one set of standing waves which can be Lorentz-transformed while being consistent with all physical principle of quantum mechanics and relativity. It is possible to construct a representation of the Poincaré group using harmonic oscillator wave functions satisfying space-time boundary conditions. This set of wave functions is capable of explaining the quantum bound state for both slow and fast hadrons. In particular it can explain the quark model for hadrons at rest, and Feynman’s parton model hadrons moving with a speed close to that of light. (shrink)

It is shown that the Lorentz-deformation property discussed in previous papers is consistent with the hadronic jet phenomenon in high-energy production processes.

In this article I argue that textual evidence from David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature does not support J. Baird Callicott's professedly Humean yet holistic environmental ethic, which understands the community (e.g., the biotic community) as a ‘metaorganismic’ entity ‘over and above’ its individual members. Based on Hume's reductionist account of the mind and his assimilation of the metaphysical nature of the mind to that of the community, I also argue that a Humean account of the community should be (...) likewise reductionist. My conclusion is that Callicott's anti-reductionist holism is at least foreign to, and at worst incompatible with, Hume's philosophy. (shrink)

_Purpose._ The article aimed at identifying the effects of modern digital technologies on the formation of human morality. _Theoretical basis._ The research base is the practical communicative philosophy. _Originality._ It lies in the fact that the article considered a moral interaction between a person and artificial intelligence. _Conclusions._ Nowadays modern digital technologies have acquired a new importance. Previously, they were only passive assistants. But now they are able to actively influence human nature not only from the outside, yet also from (...) the inside. Now they influence not only the form of thoughts but also their character. It is artificial intelligence that is the cause of the phenomenon of the "information bubble" ("echo chamber"). They are formed by mathematical algorithms for each individual user of the Internet. It is because of these algorithms, which are the basis of artificial intelligence, that we can conclude: they are guided only by strategic rationality. Therefore, they relate to the Internet user only as an object. That is why such a situation can also be a manifestation of the expansion of strategic rationality into the lifeworld, which gives rise to social pathologies. New digital technologies (first of all, social networks) are becoming an integral part of a person’s everyday life, and therefore the background of his/her life world. Virtual life becomes an important part of real life. However, virtual life is formed by the influence of the information stream, which constantly sets new "trends", including "trends" on morality. That is why a person begins to perceive only those events that are contained in this stream. Moreover, s\he can express his\her empathy only when s/he him/herself is able to join this stream and express it in virtual life. (shrink)

In Everettian quantum mechanics, justifications for the Born rule appeal to self-locating uncertainty or decision theory. Such justifications have focused exclusively on a pure-state Everettian multiverse, represented by a wave function. Recent works in quantum foundations suggest that it is viable to consider a mixed-state Everettian multiverse, represented by a (mixed-state) density matrix. Here, we develop the conceptual foundations for decoherence and branching in a mixed-state multiverse, and extend the standard Everettian justifications for the Born rule to this setting. This (...) extended framework provides a unification of 'classical' and 'quantum' probabilities, and additional theoretical benefits, for the Everettian picture. (shrink)

Environmental philosophy is one of the exciting new fields of philosophy to emerge in the last forty years. "Understanding Environmental Philosophy" presents a comprehensive, critical analysis of contemporary philosophical approaches to current ecological concerns. Key ideas are explained, placed in their broader cultural, religious, historical, political and philosophical context, and their environmental policy implications are outlined. Central ideas and concepts about environmental value, individual wellbeing, ecological holism and the metaphysics of nature set the stage for a discussion of how to (...) establish moral rules and priorities, and whether it is possible to transcend human-centred views of the world. The reader is also helped with an annotated guide to further reading, questions for discussion and revision as well as boxed studies highlighting key concepts and theoretical material. A clear and accessible introduction to this most dynamic of subjects, "Understanding Environmental Philosophy" will be invaluable for a wide range of readers. (shrink)

The paper advances a Humean metaethical analysis of "intrinsic value" - a notion fundamental in moral philosophy in general and particularly so in environmental ethics. The analysis reduces an object's moral properties (e.g., its value) to the empirical relations between the object's natural properties and people's psychological dispositions to respond to them. Moral properties turn out to be both objective and subjective, but in ways compatible with, and complementary to, each other. Next, the paper investigates whether the Humean analysis can (...) support non-anthropocentric environmental ethical theories, which attribute intrinsic value to nonhuman natural entities. It argues that one of the most useful resources from Hume for non-anthropocentrism is his account of justice as an artificial virtue, which is a plausible model for the internalization of various environmentally friendly conventions and the creation of environmental values. Finally, the paper concludes that any Humean account of intrinsic value is empiricist all the way down. Moral questions about what things are intrinsically valuable, and to what extent they are so, are ultimately empirical questions about complex psychological capacities and dispositions of human beings, which cannot be single-handedly answered by philosophers a priori; and that ethics is more appropriately seen as an interdisciplinary investigation, requiring collaboration among the various psychological and social sciences, human biological and neurological sciences, and history and philosophy. (shrink)

This article analyzes the evolution of the land ethic re-presented by J. Baird Callicott over the last two decades under pressure from the charge of misanthropy and ecofascism. It also traces the development of Callicott?s own ethical system, and examines its most current phase both in itself and in relation to his other theoretical commitments, including his particular version of moral monism, and his communitarian critique of egalitarianism. It concludes that Callicott?s communitarianism is by itself insufficient to fund an adequate (...) environmental ethic, and that for the sake of self-consistency he should either discard his moral monism or else further revise his ethical system. (shrink)

A Schrödinger-like relativistic wave equation of motion for the Lorentz-scalar potential is formulated based on a Lagrangian formalism of relativistic mechanics with a scaled time as the evolution parameter. Applications of this Schrödinger-like formalism for the Lorentz-scalar potential are given: For the square-step potential, the predictions of this formalism are free from the Klein paradox, and for the Coulomb potential, this formalism yields the exact bound-state eigenenergies and eigenfunctions.

This article examines an allegedly Humean solution provided by J. Baird Callicott to the problem of the is/ought dichotomy. It also examines an allegedly Humean argument provided by him for the land ethic's summary moral precept. It concludes that neither the solution nor the argument is Humean or cogent.

: Consumptive behavior is an action to buy a goods that actually not to fulfill the daily needs demand but just to fulfill the desire, conducted redundantly causing and extravagance of inefficiency the expense. The aim of this research is to prove that there is a difference in consumptive behavior between subjects who prefer to use credit card and subjects who prefer to use cash. Subjects are 293 young adult women, 171 subjects prefer to use cash payment and 122 subjects (...) prefer to use credit card payment method. The result shows that there is a significant difference in consumptive behavior between two groups of subjects.  . (shrink)

Environmental ethics is the discipline in philosophy that studies themoral relationship of human beings to, and also the value and moralstatus of, the environment and its non-human contents. This entrycovers: the challenge of environmental ethics to theanthropocentrism embedded in traditionalwestern ethical thinking; the development of the discipline fromthe 1960s and 1970s; the connection of deep ecology, feministenvironmental ethics, animism and social ecology to politics; theattempt to apply traditional ethical theories, includingconsequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, to supportcontemporary environmental concerns; the broader (...) concerns of somethinkers with wilderness, the built environment and the politics ofpoverty; and the ethics of sustainability and climate change. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom holds that the von Neumann entropy corresponds to thermodynamic entropy, but Hemmo and Shenker (2006) have recently argued against this view by attacking von Neumann's (1955) argument. I argue that Hemmo and Shenker's arguments fail due to several misunderstandings: about statistical-mechanical and thermodynamic domains of applicability, about the nature of mixed states, and about the role of approximations in physics. As a result, their arguments fail in all cases: in the single-particle case, the finite particles case, and the (...) infinite particles case. (shrink)

Environmental philosophy is one of the exciting new fields of philosophyto emerge in the last forty years. Understanding Environmental Philosophypresents a comprehensive, critical analysis of contemporary philosophicalapproaches to current ecological concerns. Key ideas are explained, placedin their broader cultural, religious, historical, political and philosophicalcontext, and their environmental policy implications are outlined. Centralideas and concepts about environmental value, individual wellbeing, ecological holism, and the metaphysics of nature set the stage for a discussion of how to establish moral rules and priorities and (...) whether it is possible to transcend human-centred views of the world. The book includes an annotated guide to further reading, questions for discussion and revision, and boxed studies highlighting key concepts and theoretical material. A clear and accessible introduction to this most dynamic of subjects, Understanding Environmental Philosophy will be invaluable for a wide range of readers. (shrink)

This paper attempts to examine how the concepts of power, transparency and control are perceived in the life of ordinary Hong Kong people, and how the latter have been adapting to their perceptions and evaluations. The 2008 global financial tsunami and its aftermath will likely have a serious impact on their values. Hong Kong people’s experiences may in some ways represent those of modern men, especially those in East Asia. Democracy is premised on the ideal that life is meaningful through (...) political participation. For most Hong Kong people, this is too demanding an ideal and they instead opt for economic power at the micro-level to secure an optimal measure of control over the socio-economic aspects of their own life. But even this objective has proven extremely difficult to fulfil because of the asymmetry in power between the individual on one hand, and authoritarian regimes, big businesses, organized interest groups, etc. on the other. Very often exit is not a viable option. There may be a tendency to seek satisfaction from religious pursuits, voluntary work, or other external agencies. (shrink)

The purpose of this research is to know the contribution of consumer packaging’s perception toward purchase intention of X cosmetic’s products. Subject of this research consists of 145 persons which include male and female at age 18-22 years old. The data is being correlated using regression analysis method with support of SPSS 12.0 for windows. The result of this research is that purchase intention of X cosmetic products can be explained by packaging at range 23.9% to 32.3%. The more packaging (...) is being perceived as something that attractive, good quality, and convincing, the more subject is going to have the intention to purchase the products of the X cosmetic. (shrink)

Programs in quantum gravity often claim that time emerges from fundamentally timeless physics. In the semiclassical time program time arises only after approximations are taken. Here we ask what justifies taking these approximations and show that time seems to sneak in when answering this question. This raises the worry that the approach is either unjustified or circular in deriving time from no–time.

[Accepted for publication in Lakatos's Undone Work: The Practical Turn and the Division of Philosophy of Mathematics and Philosophy of Science, special issue of Kriterion: Journal of Philosophy. Edited by S. Nagler, H. Pilin, and D. Sarikaya.] Lakatos’s analysis of progress and degeneration in the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes is well-known. Less known, however, are his thoughts on degeneration in Proofs and Refutations. I propose and motivate two new criteria for degeneration based on the discussion in Proofs and Refutations (...) – superfluity and authoritarianism. I show how these criteria augment the account in Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, providing a generalized Lakatosian account of progress and degeneration. I then apply this generalized account to a key transition point in the history of entropy – the transition to an information-theoretic interpretation of entropy – by assessing Jaynes’s 1957 paper on information theory and statistical mechanics. (shrink)

An explicit expression of the “Wigner operator” is derived, such that the Wigner function of a quantum state is equal to the expectation value of this operator with respect to the same state. This Wigner operator leads to a representation-independent procedure for establishing the correspondence between the inhomogeneous symplectic group applicable to linear canonical transformations in classical mechanics and the Weyl-metaplectic group governing the symmetry of unitary transformations in quantum mechanics.

It is shown that the jet mechanism derivable from the Lorentz deformation picture leads to a nearly constant average jet transverse momentum. It is pointed out that this is consistent with the high-energy experimental data. It is pointed out further that this result strengthens the physical basis for the minimal time-energy uncertainty combined covariantly with Heisenberg's space-momentum uncertainty relation.

This research provides an exploratory investigation of whether gift/help-receiving contexts that elicit mixed emotional variants of gratitude can be distinguished from typical gratitude-eliciting situations in their associated appraisals, action tendencies, and psychosocial effects. We examined 473 participants (159 males, 312 females, 2 others; Mage = 31.07) using a one-way four-conditions between-subjects experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to complete recall tasks describing four different gratitude-eliciting situations. Emotions, cognitive appraisals, action tendencies, and general psychosocial outcomes were assessed. Relative to a control condition (...) involving receiving a gift or help (gift/help condition), receiving something at the expense of a benefactor (benefactor-inconvenience condition) elicited gratitude-guilt; receiving something with an expectation of return (return-favour condition) elicited gratitude-disappointment and gratitude-anger; while receiving a disliked gift or receiving assistance that made things worse (backfire condition) primarily elicited gratitude-disappointment while also eliciting gratitude-anger and gratitude-guilt. Each condition was differentiable from control in their appraisals, action tendencies, and psychosocial effects. Notably, contexts which elicited mixed emotional variants of gratitude were characterised by the co-occurrence of conflicting appraisals such as pleasantness and unpleasantness or goal-congruence and goal-incongruence. Additionally, the return-favour and backfire conditions were most dissimilar from control, and were associated with the most negative action tendencies and psychosocial outcomes. (shrink)

Past research has provided some evidence of positive relationships between leisure and cognitive functioning, but questions remain regarding their mechanisms. We argue that specific negative emotio...

It is shown that both covariant harmonic oscillator formalism and quantum field theory are based on common physical principles which include Poincaré covariance, Heisenberg's space-momentum uncertainty relation, and Dirac's “C-number” time-energy uncertainty relation. It is shown in particular that the oscillator wave functions are derivable from the physical principles which are used in the derivation of the Klein-Nishina formula.

This research aimed to examine the relationship between the activeness in participating at student’s organization and interpersonal competence on college students. Subjects were students from Tarumanagara University (N = 156). A questionnaire was used to collect the data. The data were analyzed through Pearson’s correlation test. The result shows that there is a positive and significant correlation between the activeness in participating at student’s organization and interpersonal competence on college students.  .

The 21st century has been revolutionary for the field of clinical genomics, with major advancements and breakthroughs over the years. It is now considered an instrumental tool in clinical and preventive medicine and has been used on a day-to-day basis to complement current clinical practice. However, with advancements in genomics comes greater bioethical concerns, which becomes increasingly complex with more cutting-edge technology. Some of the major ethical concerns include obtaining informed consent, possibility for genetic enhancements and eugenics, genomic equity and (...) potential discrimination and cloning. It is imperative that we appreciate the benefits of genomic medicine in complementing traditional practices, identify and address the ethical concerns with relation to the practice of genomic medicine, and to ensure a common goal of improving human lives. With these in mind, the practice of genomics can have maximum impact in the collective health of the population, with greater benefit to all. (shrink)

The age of maturity of children to consent for medical research is under debate, as different authorities regard the capacity of young teenagers as either satisfactory or not to grant consent without parental participation in the process. The present paper contrasts the generally accepted guideline for ethics in paediatric research in Canada with what the same children are allowed and expected to be able to do as babysitters. This comparison reveals deep incongruences in the way the maturity of the same (...) children is appreciated for two different tasks. (shrink)