This article studies the underinvestigated but fascinating issue of the sociological determinants of accounting misbehavior while focusing on an allegedly illicit accounting practice (i.e., restatement) in family- vs. nonfamily-controlled corporations. Under the framework of institutional anomie theory, we examined whether sociological structures (i.e., legal forces and cultural values) influence accounting errors inducing restatements. By applying a multivariate regression analysis to a sample of restating firms listed in 23 countries during the 2006 to 2014 period, we found (...) that legal forces and cultural values significantly moderate the severity of accounting errors. The results of this study suggest that investors, managers, and policymakers should more fully consider the sociological structures of societies when debating the feasibility of corporate misbehaviors, as combining firm-level and country-level analyses could help to predict a firm’s accounting misbehaviors, such as more severe accounting errors. (shrink)

In light of the recent crisis and its aftershocks, it becomes crucial to reflect on the relationship between finance and accounting and on how to integrate ethics and efficiency, as well as on how to motivate and empower practitioners in the world of finance to commit to justice, fairness and enhanced understanding, and to improving their personal integrity. This article, written as an editorial introduction to a special issue includes works related to control measurement and ethical behavior, misbehaviors in (...) finances and accounting, professionalism in accounting, ethical investing and corporate reporting. We conclude by suggesting further research for a better integration of technical aspects of accounting and finances into business activity—human activity actually—and an for understanding of ethics not limited to rules, but as a mutual and interdependent system of values, virtues and principles. (shrink)

"Golf day 2005 @ federal golf club, red hill." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (196), pp. 7.

ABSTRACT:We analyze corporate ethics programs as control systems, arguing that how control is exercised may have pernicious consequences and be morally problematic. In particular, the control cultivated by ethics programs may weaken employees’ ability and motivation to exercise their own moral judgment, especially in novel situations. We develop this argument first by examining how organization theorists analyze control as an instrument of management coordination, and by addressing the political implications of control. We discuss coercive and enabling control as variations that (...) help account for the distinction between compliance-based ethics programs and values-based ethics programs. We then explore three potential drawbacks of ethics programs: the specter of indoctrination, a politicization of ethics, and an atrophy of competence. Ethics programs that rely on coercive control may undermine their own effectiveness at stemming misbehavior. (shrink)

Recent studies from Western countries indicate significant levels of questionable research practices, but similar data from low and middle-income countries are limited. Our aims were to assess the prevalence of and attitudes regarding research misconduct among researchers in several universities in the Middle East and to identify factors that might account for our findings. We distributed an anonymous questionnaire to a convenience sample of investigators at several universities in Egypt, Lebanon, and Bahrain. Participants were asked to a) self-report their extent (...) of research misconducts, as well as their knowledge of colleagues engaging in similar research misconducts and b) provide their extent of agreement with certain attitudes about research misconduct. We used descriptive, bivariate, and multivariate logistic regression statistics to analyze the data. Data from 278 participants showed a high prevalence of misconduct, as 59.4% of our respondents self-reported to committing at least one misbehaviors and 74.5% reported having knowledge of any misbehaviors among any of their colleagues. The most common type of self-report misconduct was “circumventing research ethics regulations” followed by “fabrication and falsification”. A significant predictor of misconduct included a lack of “prior ethics training”. Scientific misconduct represents a significant issue in several universities in the Middle East. The demonstration that a lack of “prior ethics training” was a significant predictor of misconduct should lead to educational initiatives in research integrity. Further studies are needed to confirm whether our results can be generalized to other universities in the Middle East. (shrink)

Mainstream social psychology focuses on how people characteristically violate norms of action through social misbehaviors such as conformity with false majority judgments, destructive obedience, and failures to help those in need. Likewise, they are seen to violate norms of reasoning through cognitive errors such as misuse of social information, self-enhancement, and an over-readiness to attribute dispositional characteristics. The causes of this negative research emphasis include the apparent informativeness of norm violation, the status of good behavior and judgment as unconfirmable null (...) hypotheses, and the allure of counter-intuitive findings. The shortcomings of this orientation include frequently erroneous imputations of error, findings of mutually contradictory errors, incoherent interpretations of error, an inability to explain the sources of behavioral or cognitive achievement, and the inhibition of generalized theory. Possible remedies include increased attention to the complete range of behavior and judgmental accomplishment, analytic reforms emphasizing effect sizes and Bayesian inference, and a theoretical paradigm able to account for both the sources of accomplishment and of error. A more balanced social psychology would yield not only a more positive view of human nature, but also an improved understanding of the bases of good behavior and accurate judgment, coherent explanations of occasional lapses, and theoretically grounded suggestions for improvement. Key Words: Bayesian inference; biases; normative models; personality; positive psychology; rationality; reasoning; social behavior; social judgment; social psychology. (shrink)

In view of the numerous accounting and corporate scandals associated with various forms of moral misconduct and the recent financial crisis, economics and business programs are often accused of actively contributing to the amoral decision making of their graduates. It is argued that theories and ideas taught at universities engender moral misbehavior among some managers, as these theories mainly focus on the primacy of profit-maximization and typically neglect the ethical and moral dimensions of decision making. To investigate this (...) criticism, two overlapping effects must be disentangled: the self-selection effect and the treatment effect. Drawing on the concept of moral judgment competence, we empirically examine this question with a sample of 1773 bachelor’s and 501 master’s students. Our results reveal that there is neither a self-selection nor a treatment effect for economics and business studies. Moreover, our results indicate that—regardless of the course of studies—university education in general does not seem to foster students’ moral development. (shrink)

Engagement events—whether interviews, installations, or participatory encounters—can entail a range of happenings which, in one way or another, “overspill” the empirical, analytic, or political framing of those engagement events. This article looks at how we might attend to these overspills—for instance, forms of “misbehavior” on the part of lay participants—not only to provide accounts of them but also to explore ways of deploying them creatively. In particular, Stengers’ figure of the “idiot” is proposed as a device for deploying those (...) overspills to interrogate “what we are busy doing” as social science researchers in engagement events. This interrogation is furthered by considering the proactive idiocy of “Speculative Design’s” version of the public engagement with science which seems directly to engender “overspilling.” Providing examples of speculative design prototypes and practices, the article develops an ideal typical contrast between social scientific and designerly perspectives on public engagement. It is suggested that speculative design can serve as a resource for supplementing “science and technology studies” conceptualizations of, and practices toward, public, engagement, and science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Confronting Aristotle's EthicsDavid DepewConfronting Aristotle's Ethics by Eugene Garver Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. ix + 290. $49.00, cloth.Readers of this journal are likely to be familiar with Eugene Garver's 1994 Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character. The main claim advanced in that important book is that for Aristotle rhetoric is an art because it has internal norms and ends. From this, it follows that although (...) any red-blooded rhetor probably does aim at winning a case, advancing a political career, getting rich, and other external goals, what is artful in rhetorical craft (technikos), and hence expressive of the distinctive human capacity for human rationality, is timely argumentation that binds premises to actionable conclusions through displays of good character and apt emotional response. This ordered combination of ethos, pathos, and logos recruits, or if you will interpellates, an audience that is uniquely capable of judging cases, proposals, and performances reasonably. In this way Aristotle defends rhetoric as a genuine art—an intellectual virtue—against Plato's Gorgias.To arrive at this conclusion Garver draws more widely on other parts of the Aristotelian corpus than rhetorical scholars normally do. In particular, he contrasts external with internal ends by using Aristotle's metaphysical distinction between movements, processes, or behaviors (kineseis), of which the world is chock-full, and actualizations or realizations (energeiai) of capacities, which are more rare. Because rhetorical art, qua artful, is an actualization, Garver infers that it is a "practical art" and so brushes up closely against ethical-political praxis. [End Page 184]How closely? To be sure, they are not identical. Praxis actualizes our rational capacities by issuing in deeds done for their own sake rather than in an ordered series of acts whose intelligibility and worth are, in the end, measured by their outcomes or products, as in arts (poiesis) (46). For this reason a rhetor or a doctor can display artfulness by consciously misbehaving as well as by doing his or her job well, whereas willful misbehavior on the part of a moral agent automatically disbars him or her from possessing practical wisdom (phronesis) at all (46; see Nicomachean Ethics [NE] 1140b22–25). Accordingly, even though moral virtues and technical skills are both acquired by slowly internalizing norms that at first aim only at external ends (29) and are both matched to their distinctive ends through their internal rational norms, Aristotle makes it abundantly clear that "the arts, including rhetoric, do not bring the soul into a good condition" (10). They are not the wellspring or protector of the intrinsically good actions that are constituents of happiness. that role is assigned to moral virtues such as prudence, courage, liberality, and, when these are practiced in relation to others, justice and friendship.Confronting Aristotle's Ethics begins by reviewing the above account of rhetorical art in Garver's earlier book. Precisely because that account posits a greater affinity between ethical virtue and craft knowledge than most contemporary analyses of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Garver feels a need to spell out more carefully than usual why Aristotle thinks that the arts, even at their best, cannot yield the intrinsically good acts that the moral virtues do and why for Aristotle the habitual performance of just such acts is constitutive of happiness (eudaimonia). To answer these questions is the aim of the book.Garver reports that satisfactory answers are surprisingly rare even in otherwise sophisticated contemporary Aristotelian studies (5–7). Now and again he points to one reason why this might be so. Since at least the eighteenth century, Aristotle's ethical theory has been commended by sloughing off its original political integument. Even Hannah Arendt, a devotee of Aristotle's conception of the public life if ever there was one, says that public figures must leave happiness to the private lives of little people. this depoliticization of ethics has allowed contemporary commentators to evade Aristotle's burden of proof. As good readers of Aristotle they may try to distance themselves from people who think that there might be an art of happiness by which one can technically realize one's desires. (Your local Barnes and Noble will... (shrink)

How can we make businesspeople more concerned about the truth of the information they spread or allow to circulate? In this age of ‘fake news’, ‘business bullshit’ and ‘post-truth,’ the issue is of the utmost importance, especially for business trustworthiness in the internet economy. The issue is related to a kind of epistemic responsibility, that consists in accounting for one’s own epistemic wrongdoings, such as making a third party believe something false. Despite growing interest in epistemic misbehavior in (...) the literature of business ethics, the question of epistemic responsibility has been neglected. The aim of this paper is therefore to address this gap, by proposing a notion of epistemic responsibility for business, that may help regulate undesirable epistemic behavior, such as the spreading of false information. To define this notion of epistemic responsibility, I have introduced the concept of epistemic fault. Being epistemically responsible consists in being disposed to account for alleged epistemic faults. This notion of epistemic fault relies on a theoretical framework which combines a typology of eight ‘epistemic values’, a normative stance regarding these values, and a dispositional approach to epistemic virtues and vices. I use this theoretical framework to integrate the various accounts of epistemic virtues and vices found in the literature into a single explanatory scheme. Combined with the notion of epistemic responsibility itself, such an integrative framework should facilitate the practical application of an operational epistemic ethics in business, i.e., the development of virtuous epistemic practices. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the 2008 financial crisis in Iceland through the lens of Donaldson’s concept of normalization of questionable behavior. We study the report published by the Special Investigation Commission, an investigation initiated by the Icelandic Parliament near the end of 2008. The report provides a detailed and systematic account of the processes leading up to the crisis. Our aim is to determine the extent to which the behaviors of professionals in the Icelandic financial sector can be explained (...) as a gradual fading of moral concerns to the point that they perceived the sale of high-risk products to unassuming customers for their own short-term benefit to be morally unproblematic. In doing so, we consider both character and circumstance explanations of moral misbehavior. We expand on Donaldson’s initial description of normalization of questionable behavior by applying the concept of moral neutralization, which is defined by criminologists Sykes and Matza as the process of convincing oneself that an option that initially conflicted with one’s own moral beliefs is actually morally acceptable. We find indications that individuals in the Icelandic financial sector did engage in moral neutralization in their attempts to frame their own actions in an acceptable light. In our study, we identify one way of neutralizing away moral dissonance not captured in the original theoretical framework. Icelandic bankers justified their behavior by claiming that they did not break any relevant rules or regulations when they engaged in what were later labeled questionable activities. Our name for this kind of justification is claim of having breached no rule. (shrink)

The 2003 National Business Ethics Survey, conducted by the Ethics Resource Center, found that respondents who were both young and had short organizational tenure were substantially less likely than other respondents to report misconduct that they observed in the workplace to an authority. We propose that the life-course model of deviance can help account for this attenuation of acquiescence in misbehavior. As employees learn to perceive informal prosocial control during their socialization into the workforce, we hypothesize that they will (...) become more willing to blow the whistle on misconduct. Analysis of the 2003 NBES (n = 1,417, with a subset of 314 who observed misconduct) reveals that young and short-tenured employees do perceive less informal prosocial control, and that informal prosocial control does boost whistle-blowing; however, tests for mediation of the relationship between youth and short-tenure and whistle-blowing by informal social control were largely negative, suggesting that other explanations are still needed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Confronting Aristotle's EthicsDavid DepewConfronting Aristotle's Ethics by Eugene Garver Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. ix + 290. $49.00, cloth.Readers of this journal are likely to be familiar with Eugene Garver's 1994 Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character. The main claim advanced in that important book is that for Aristotle rhetoric is an art because it has internal norms and ends. From this, it follows that although (...) any red-blooded rhetor probably does aim at winning a case, advancing a political career, getting rich, and other external goals, what is artful in rhetorical craft (technikos), and hence expressive of the distinctive human capacity for human rationality, is timely argumentation that binds premises to actionable conclusions through displays of good character and apt emotional response. This ordered combination of ethos, pathos, and logos recruits, or if you will interpellates, an audience that is uniquely capable of judging cases, proposals, and performances reasonably. In this way Aristotle defends rhetoric as a genuine art—an intellectual virtue—against Plato's Gorgias.To arrive at this conclusion Garver draws more widely on other parts of the Aristotelian corpus than rhetorical scholars normally do. In particular, he contrasts external with internal ends by using Aristotle's metaphysical distinction between movements, processes, or behaviors (kineseis), of which the world is chock-full, and actualizations or realizations (energeiai) of capacities, which are more rare. Because rhetorical art, qua artful, is an actualization, Garver infers that it is a "practical art" and so brushes up closely against ethical-political praxis. [End Page 184]How closely? To be sure, they are not identical. Praxis actualizes our rational capacities by issuing in deeds done for their own sake rather than in an ordered series of acts whose intelligibility and worth are, in the end, measured by their outcomes or products, as in arts (poiesis) (46). For this reason a rhetor or a doctor can display artfulness by consciously misbehaving as well as by doing his or her job well, whereas willful misbehavior on the part of a moral agent automatically disbars him or her from possessing practical wisdom (phronesis) at all (46; see Nicomachean Ethics [NE] 1140b22–25). Accordingly, even though moral virtues and technical skills are both acquired by slowly internalizing norms that at first aim only at external ends (29) and are both matched to their distinctive ends through their internal rational norms, Aristotle makes it abundantly clear that "the arts, including rhetoric, do not bring the soul into a good condition" (10). They are not the wellspring or protector of the intrinsically good actions that are constituents of happiness. that role is assigned to moral virtues such as prudence, courage, liberality, and, when these are practiced in relation to others, justice and friendship.Confronting Aristotle's Ethics begins by reviewing the above account of rhetorical art in Garver's earlier book. Precisely because that account posits a greater affinity between ethical virtue and craft knowledge than most contemporary analyses of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Garver feels a need to spell out more carefully than usual why Aristotle thinks that the arts, even at their best, cannot yield the intrinsically good acts that the moral virtues do and why for Aristotle the habitual performance of just such acts is constitutive of happiness (eudaimonia). To answer these questions is the aim of the book.Garver reports that satisfactory answers are surprisingly rare even in otherwise sophisticated contemporary Aristotelian studies (5–7). Now and again he points to one reason why this might be so. Since at least the eighteenth century, Aristotle's ethical theory has been commended by sloughing off its original political integument. Even Hannah Arendt, a devotee of Aristotle's conception of the public life if ever there was one, says that public figures must leave happiness to the private lives of little people. this depoliticization of ethics has allowed contemporary commentators to evade Aristotle's burden of proof. As good readers of Aristotle they may try to distance themselves from people who think that there might be an art of happiness by which one can technically realize one's desires. (Your local Barnes and Noble will... (shrink)

African researchers and their collaborators have been making significant contributions to useful research findings and discoveries in Africa. Despite evidence of scientific misconduct even in heavily regulated research environments, there is little documented information that supports prevalence of research misconduct in Africa. Available literature on research misconduct has focused on the developed world, where credible research integrity systems are already in place. Public attention to research misconduct has lately increased, calling for attention to weaknesses in current research policies and regulatory (...) frameworks. Africa needs policies, structural and governance systems that promote responsible conduct of research. To begin to offset this relative lack of documented evidence of research misconduct, contributors working in various research institutions from nine African countries agreed to share their experiences to highlight problems and explore the need to identify strategies to promote research integrity in the African continent. The experiences shared include anecdotal but reliable accounts of previously undocumented research misconduct, including some ‘normal misbehavior’ of frontline staff in those countries. Two broad approaches to foster greater research integrity are proposed including promotion of institutional and individual capacity building to instil a culture of responsible research conduct in existing and upcoming research scientist and developing deterrent and corrective policies to minimize research misconduct and other questionable research practices. By sharing these experiences and through the strategies proposed, the authors hope to limit the level of research misconduct and promote research integrity in Africa. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cause, Fault, NormJohn Z. Sadler (bio)Keywordscriminality, mental disorder, responsibilityThanks to the commentators for their fine work. In my brief comments I cannot address all that is raised, but can touch upon everyone’s discussion briefly.In her commentary, Gwen Adshead reflects on her experience as a forensic psychiatrist and therapist for violent offenders. Although Adshead discusses a number of important points, I found her insight into why some vices find their (...) way into psychiatric classification particularly compelling and thought provoking. I will here interpret these in my own terms. Dr. Adshead implies that a (perhaps) assumed folk psychology underlies our motivation to classify (as disorder) some, but not all vices. The contribution of this folk psychology does not depend on particular details, but rather, the folk psychology concerns the degree to which the vice–actor’s actions are amenable to explanation, or are transparently understandable or interpretable. We (think we) understand why prostitutes sell themselves and why tax evaders cheat; their folk psychologies are variously constituted by moralistic constructs like desperation, oppression, licentiousness, greed, opportunism, and indignation. In contrast, some offenses step outside our empathic realm: the pedophile, or the serial killer, or even the persistently acting-out child provoke onlookers to wonder, “There has to be something wrong with a person who does that!” “Loud” symptoms in themselves do not qualify; seemingly incomprehensible loud symptoms fit better into the “sick” category. Indeed, in a recent translation of Foucault’s lectures at the College de France, Foucault describes the “monster” as combining “the impossible and the forbidden.” (Foucault 1999, 56) When confronted with the impossible and forbidden, the lust for classification is irresistible.Adshead’s wonderment about the use of “really” to question the explanation of wrongful conduct (what’s “really” going on) leads naturally to Michael First’s discussion. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-IV really tries to make a firm distinction between vice and mental disorder, and First describes the DSM approach.Drawing on his experience as the DSM-IV Text Editor, Dr. First provides a particularly lucid presentation of the distinction between what I call “vice” and mental disorder. He supplies vivid examples to illustrate his points. The DSM key for distinguishing disorder from vice is whether “the deviance or conflict is a symptom of a dysfunction in the individual.” As other commentators point out later, First notes that the “vice action” (a term coined by Morse in his own commentary following) may disguise a number of possible explanations: the car thief may simply be seeking thrills and profit, or may be motivated by a delusion—leading to alternative explanations for the behavior. Sometimes the explanation for vice actions are transparent—as in the red Mustang example, but other times they are not so clear. The DSM approach requires the clinician to [End Page 51] make an explanatory claim in order to distinguish the appearance of vice versus the appearance of disorder. I think everyone would agree that an explanation of the phenomenon is required in distinguishing vice from disorder, so that much can be accepted.In my view, the problems with the DSM account are three: (1) The requirement for an internal psychological dysfunction is an easy claim to make for virtually any vice condition. The prostitute’s vice may be attributable to childhood trauma, deviant social learning, pathological desire to sexually control others, and so on. The tax evader may in turn have a pathological resentment of authority combined with a desperate financial situation and a pathological denial and avoidance of paying taxes. Every misbehavior has its psychology, and if we proclaim this psychology is abnormal or deviant, then we have an “internal dysfunction.” Indeed, it is easy to proclaim a psychology as abnormal if it is less than an ideal response to circumstances, or even an adequate response to circumstances; after all, not everyone who is exposed to sexual trauma becomes a prostitute nor does every financially desperate individual cheat on taxes. The DSM’s overinclusiveness on this account defaults to an arbitrariness about what counts as a legitimate (or not) internal dysfunction. Here there will be great argument.(2) First (and later, Wells) admits there... (shrink)

Mineral species are, at first glance, an excellent candidate for an ideal set of natural kinds somewhere beyond the periodic table. Mineralogists have a detailed set of rules and formal procedure for ratifying new species, and minerals are a less messy subject matter than biological species, psychological disorders, or even chemicals more broadly—all areas of taxonomy where the status of species as natural kinds has been disputed. After explaining how philosophers have tended to get mineralogy wrong in discussions of natural (...) kinds, I show how minerals species don’t behave like natural kinds. They are defined on the basis of human intentionality, not merely natural distinctions. They aren’t ideal grounds for inductive inference. And they don’t form a system that divides nature along a set of equivalent joints. While this is a regrettable outcome to those of us who like the idea of science relying on natural kinds, I contend that mineralogy is doing just fine without a natural kind-based taxonomy, and may in fact be better off without one. (shrink)

Scientific authorship serves to identify and acknowledge individuals who “contribute significantly” to published research. However, specific authorship norms and practices often differ within and across disciplines, labs, and cultures. As a consequence, authorship disagreements are commonplace in team research. This study aims to better understand the prevalence of authorship disagreements, those factors that may lead to disagreements, as well as the extent and nature of resulting misbehavior. Methods include an international online survey of researchers who had published from 2011 (...) to 2015. Of the 6673 who completed the main questions pertaining to authorship disagreement and misbehavior, nearly half reported disagreements regarding authorship naming; and discipline, rank, and gender had significant effects on disagreement rates. Paradoxically, researchers in multidisciplinary teams that typically reflect a range of norms and values, were less likely to have faced disagreements regarding authorship. Respondents reported having witnessed a wide range of misbehavior including: instances of hostility, undermining of a colleague’s work during meetings/talks, cutting corners on research, sabotaging a colleague’s research, or producing fraudulent work to be more competitive. These findings suggest that authorship disputes may contribute to an unhealthy competitive dynamic that can undermine researchers’ wellbeing, team cohesion, and scientific integrity. (shrink)

BackgroundConcerns about research misbehavior in academic science have sparked interest in the factors that may explain research misbehavior. Often three clusters of factors are distinguished: individual factors, climate factors and publication factors. Our research question was: to what extent can individual, climate and publication factors explain the variance in frequently perceived research misbehaviors?MethodsFrom May 2017 until July 2017, we conducted a survey study among academic researchers in Amsterdam. The survey included three measurement instruments that we previously reported individual (...) results of and here we integrate these findings.ResultsOne thousand two hundred ninety-eight researchers completed the survey. Results showed that individual, climate and publication factors combined explained 34% of variance in perceived frequency of research misbehavior. Individual factors explained 7%, climate factors explained 22% and publication factors 16%.ConclusionsOur results suggest that the perceptions of the research climate play a substantial role in explaining variance in research misbehavior. This suggests that efforts to improve departmental norms might have a salutary effect on behavior. (shrink)

W. Matthews Grant's "Dual Sources Account" aims at explaining how God causes all creaturely actions while leaving them free in a robust libertarian sense. It includes an account of predestination that is supposed to allow for the possibility that some created persons ultimately spend eternity in hell. I argue here that the resources Grant provides for understanding why God might permit created persons to end up in hell are, for two different reasons, insufficient. I then provide possible solutions to these (...) two problems, compatible with Grant's account overall, that help show why God might allow hell. (shrink)

Essential for the concept of the law of nature is not only spatio-temporal universality, but also functionality in the sense of the dependency on physical conditions of natural entities. In the following it is explained in detail that just the neglect of this functional property is to be understood as the real reason for the occurrence of the Goodman paradox – with the consequence, that the behavior of things seems to be completely at the mercy of change of unique unrepeatable (...) temporal points. It is exactly this (mis-)understanding that also generated the induction problem. From the intrinsic connection between universality and functionality, however, – that is my claim – the ontological consequence of a nature results, for which lawfulness is coupled to essentially functionally defined time sequences, thereby implying a potentiality dimension of nature, too. (shrink)

BackgroundCodes of conduct mainly focus on research misconduct that takes the form of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. However, at the aggregate level, lesser forms of research misbehavior may be more important due to their much higher prevalence. Little is known about what the most frequent research misbehaviors are and what their impact is if they occur.MethodsA survey was conducted among 1353 attendees of international research integrity conferences. They were asked to score 60 research misbehaviors according to their views on (...) and perceptions of the frequency of occurrence, preventability, impact on truth (validity), and impact on trust between scientists on 5-point scales. We expressed the aggregate level impact as the product of frequency scores and truth, trust and preventability scores, respectively. We ranked misbehaviors based on mean scores. Additionally, relevant demographic and professional background information was collected from participants.ResultsResponse was 17% of those who were sent the invitational email and 33% of those who opened it. The rankings suggest that selective reporting, selective citing, and flaws in quality assurance and mentoring are viewed as the major problems of modern research. The “deadly sins” of fabrication and falsification ranked highest on the impact on truth but low to moderate on aggregate level impact on truth, due to their low estimated frequency. Plagiarism is thought to be common but to have little impact on truth although it ranked high on aggregate level impact on trust.ConclusionsWe designed a comprehensive list of 60 major and minor research misbehaviors. Our respondents were much more concerned over sloppy science than about scientific fraud (FFP). In the fostering of responsible conduct of research, we recommend to develop interventions that actively discourage the high ranking misbehaviors from our study. (shrink)

Students display resistance, including academic dishonesty, at all educational levels. In the present study, we qualitatively examined the extent and incidence of academic misbehaviors by 101 US college students. Using a combination of self-reported closed- and open-ended questions, we developed a multi-faceted understanding of how students perceived their own classroom misbehaviors to avoid work as being original, clever, deceptive, and unethical. Questions pertaining to possible prevention, impact on grade, and repetition of the misbehavior were also included. Further, environmental contributors (...) of such behavior were explored, inclusive of the teacher, curriculum, larger school/institutional reasons, peers, and out-of-school issues. Thematic analyses identified distinct themes related to each factor, with poor time management emerging as a salient antecedent across factors. The present study also reviews and provides strategies to improve time management among students to mitigate future instances of academic misbehavior. (shrink)

Germany is considered to be a pioneer of social security systems; nonetheless, globalization and demographic changes have put enormous pressure on them. A solution is not yet in sight as the debate on the future of the German social security systems still lacks consensus. We argue that ideas matter and that the debate can benefit from a deeper reflection on the concept of social security. This objective is pursued along two lines. First, we take a historical perspective and reconstruct the (...) development of Germany's social security systems. Second, we scrutinize from a theoretical perspective how social security is conceptualized in public and theoretical debates. Behind the various positions, we identify four basic ideal types. We then analyze how these ideal types account for the benefits of social security systems and what role they assign to corporations in providing social security. While two ultimately reinforce potential conflicts between different groups in society, the other two ideal types reveal possible benefits for all. The last ideal type actually conceptualizes social security systems as insurance that fosters risky but overall productive investments in human and other forms of capital. Therefore, it can be shown that social security systems are not necessarily threatened by globalization and that incentives exist for corporations to invest in the provision of social security. (shrink)

Considering the organization’s ethical context as a framework to investigate workplace phenomena, this field study of military reserve personnel examines the relationships among perceptions of psychosocial group variables, such as cohesiveness, helping behavior and peer leadership, employee job attitudes, and the likelihood of individuals’ withholding on-the-job effort, a form of organizational misbehavior. Hypotheses were tested with a sample of 290 individuals using structural equation modeling, and support for negative relationships between perceptions of positive group context and withholding effort by (...) individual employees was found. In addition, individual effort-performance expectancy and individual job satisfaction were negatively related to withholding effort. The findings provide evidence that individual perceptions of positive group context play a key role in the presence of misbehavior at work. The results indicate that positive group context might be an important element of ethical climate that should be managed to temper occurrence of such adverse work behavior. (shrink)

Consumer indirect misbehavior in access-based consumption is a significant challenge for enterprises. The literature is in short of a deep understanding of the antecedent conditions of consumer indirect misbehavior in this context and limited by inconsistent findings, calling for developing a holistic and integrative theoretical framework. This study integrates three commonly used theoretical perspectives in the consumer misbehavior literature to present holistic archetypes of consumer indirect misbehavior formation. In accordance with this theoretical objective, we adopted an (...) emerging approach for configurational analysis, i.e., fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, to analyze the complex combinations of six influencing factors. We collected data using a scenario-based field survey of 264 experienced consumers of a popular bike-sharing service in China. The scenarios were developed based on relevant literature and a Delphi study. The fsQCA results reveal multiple configurations for high and low levels of consumer misbehavior intention. Specifically, perceived benefits and moral definition play important roles, while the effect of sanctions is highly dependent on other factors. These results lead us to derive three theoretical propositions for antecedent conditions leading to consumers’ indirect misbehavior intentions in access-based consumption. This study enriches our understanding of the causes of misbehavior and provides novel insights for management practitioners to take appropriate countermeasures. (shrink)

We examine whether, relative to their global peers, the financial performance of firms from developing countries leads to increases in human rights abuses. We also study the institutional conditions that qualify this relationship. Based on a combination of behavioral and neo-institutional theories, we suggest there is a positive relationship between financial performance and human rights misbehavior as home country liabilities motivate firms to misbehave to achieve their primary goal of economic leadership. We also suggest that strong regulatory and normative (...) pressures attenuate the abovementioned positive relationship, as failure to comply with norms endangers such firms’ secondary goal of achieving international legitimacy. Our analysis, based on a sample of 245 large companies from eight developing countries studied over a 20-year period, supports our hypotheses. Our empirical results suggest that such companies misbehave when they endeavor to strike a balance between maintaining their global economic leadership and sustaining their social legitimacy. (shrink)

By investigating conceptions of experience from Descartes to Kant, this book shows that one of the central questions of the early-modern period was how humans can instantiate in their actions the principles of rational moral agency, while at the same time responding with their bodies to the causal play of nature. Through the analysis of this question, the book draws attention to the bodily underpinnings of the ability to experience thoughts and feelings. It thus challenges overly subjectivist interpretations that concentrate (...) on the inner realm of the experiencing mind and because of this fail to account for the worldly dimension of being experientially responsive to the affections of the body. (shrink)

This comprehensive study offers a balanced assessment of libertarian accounts of free will. Bringing to bear recent work on action, causation, and causal explanation, Clarke defends a type of event-causal view from popular objections concerning rationality and diminished control. He subtly explores the extent to which event-causal accounts can secure the things for the sake of which we value free will, judging their success here to be limited. Clarke then sets out a highly original agent-causal account, one that integrates agent (...) causation and nondeterministic event causation. He defends this view from a number of objections but argues that we should find the substance causation required by any agent-causal account to be impossible. Clarke concludes that if a broad thesis of incompatibilism is correct--one on which both free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism--then no libertarian account is entirely adequate. (shrink)

I ask you to X. You now have a reason to X. My request gave you a reason. How? One unpopular theory is the epistemic account, according to which requests do not create any new reasons but instead simply reveal information. For instance, my request that you X reveals that I desire that you X, and my desire gives you a reason to X. Peter Schaber has recently attacked both the epistemic account and other theories of the reason-giving force of (...) requests. Schaber defends a new theory of the reason-giving force of requests according to which request give reasons because it is valuable for requesters and requestees that requests have this power. In this paper I argue that Schaber's attack on the epistemic account fails, and that his own theory ought to be rejected because it faces compelling objections. (shrink)

College students judged dog or cat misbehavior via questionnaire items. Common factor analysis yielded 3 dimensions of student response: the sinner ; the sin ; and mercy . Correlations among sinner, sin, and mercy factor scores supported predictions from causal attribution theory. Nevertheless, cross-tabulation analysis revealed that nearly 90% of all respondents endorsed mercy , regardless of the extent to which the animals were seen as sinners , or evaluations of the level of sin . Absolutely high average mercy (...) scores indicated an animal positivity bias. Results thus evoked the adage that "the quality of mercy is not strained." That is, regarding errant companion animals, cognitive responses to punish and to forgive are not always mutually exclusive options. (shrink)

I propose an account of aesthetic value, where aesthetic value lies in the process of aesthetic engagement: in our activity of perceiving, guiding our attention, interpreting, and otherwise wrestling with aesthetic objects. It also includes our social activities of engagement: arguing with each other, writing criticism, making top-ten lists. (This is a short summary of a view developed in greater detail elsewhere.).

It is widely agreed that reactive attitudes play a central role in our practices concerned with holding people responsible. However, it remains controversial which emotional attitudes count as reactive attitudes such that they are eligible for this central role. Specifically, though theorists near universally agree that guilt is a reactive attitude, they are much more hesitant on whether to also include shame. This paper presents novel arguments for the view that shame is a reactive attitude. The arguments also support the (...) view that shame is a reactive attitude in the sense that concerns moral accountability. The discussion thereby challenges both the view that shame is not a reactive attitude at all, suggested by philosophers such as R. Jay Wallace and Stephen Darwall, and the view that shame is a reactive attitude but does not concern moral accountability, recently defended by Andreas Carlsson and Douglas Portmore. (shrink)

Calls to hold artificial intelligence to account are intensifying. Activists and researchers alike warn of an “accountability gap” or even a “crisis of accountability” in AI. Meanwhile, several prominent scholars maintain that accountability holds the key to governing AI. But usage of the term varies widely in discussions of AI ethics and governance. This chapter begins by disambiguating some different senses and dimensions of accountability, distinguishing it from neighboring concepts, and identifying sources of confusion. It proceeds to explore the idea (...) that AI operates within an accountability gap arising from technical features of AI as well as the social context in which it is deployed. The chapter also evaluates various proposals for closing this gap. I conclude that the role of accountability in AI ethics and governance is vital but also more limited than some suggest. Accountability’s primary job description is to verify compliance with substantive normative principles—once those principles are settled. Theories of accountability cannot ultimately tell us what substantive standards to account for, especially when norms are contested or still emerging. Nonetheless, formal mechanisms of accountability provide a way of diagnosing and discouraging egregious wrongdoing even in the absence of normative agreement. Providing accounts can also be an important first step toward the development of more comprehensive regulatory standards for AI. (shrink)

Accountability is a cornerstone of the governance of artificial intelligence (AI). However, it is often defined too imprecisely because its multifaceted nature and the sociotechnical structure of AI systems imply a variety of values, practices, and measures to which accountability in AI can refer. We address this lack of clarity by defining accountability in terms of answerability, identifying three conditions of possibility (authority recognition, interrogation, and limitation of power), and an architecture of seven features (context, range, agent, forum, standards, process, (...) and implications). We analyse this architecture through four accountability goals (compliance, report, oversight, and enforcement). We argue that these goals are often complementary and that policy-makers emphasise or prioritise some over others depending on the proactive or reactive use of accountability and the missions of AI governance. (shrink)

This essay warns of eroding accountability in computerized societies. It argues that assumptions about computing and features of situations in which computers are produced create barriers to accountability. Drawing on philosophical analyses of moral blame and responsibility, four barriers are identified: 1) the problem of many hands, 2) the problem of bugs, 3) blaming the computer, and 4) software ownership without liability. The paper concludes with ideas on how to reverse this trend.

In this essay I analyze some conceptual difficulties associated with the demand that global institutions be made more democratically accountable. In the absence of a world state, it may seem inconsistent to insist that global institutions be accountable to all those subject to their decisions while also insisting that the members of these institutions, as representatives of states, simultaneously remain accountable to the citizens of their own countries for the special responsibilities they have towards them. This difficulty seems insurmountable in (...) light of the widespread acceptance of a state-centric conception of human rights, according to which states and only states bear primary responsibility for the protection of their citizens' rights. Against this conception, I argue that in light of the current structures of global governance the monistic ascription of human rights obligations to states is no longer plausible. Under current conditions, states are bound to fail in their ability to protect the human rights of their citizens whenever potential violations either stem from transnational regulations or are perpetrated by non-state actors. In order to show the plausibility of an alternative, pluralist conception of human rights obligations I turn to the current debate among scholars of international law regarding the human rights obligations of non-state actors. I document the various ways in which these obligations could be legally entrenched in global financial institutions such as the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank. These examples indicate feasible methods for strengthening the democratic accountability of these institutions while also respecting the accountability that participating member states owe to their own citizens. I conclude that, once the distinctions between the obligations to respect, protect and fulfill human rights are taken into account, no conceptual difficulty remains in holding states and non-state actors accountable for their respective human rights obligations. (shrink)

I shall present a problem about accountability, and its solution by Strawson’s ‘Freedom and Resentment’. Some readers of this don’t see it as a profound contribution to moral philosophy, and I want to help them. It may be helpful to follow up Strawson’s gracefully written discussion with a more staccato presentation. My treatment will also be angled somewhat differently from his, so that its lights and shadows will fall with a certain difference, which may make it serviceable even to the (...) converted. Also, I shall point to some disputable things in ‘Freedom and Resentment’, and offer repairs. So I wrote in the first published version of this paper. I wanted not only to be useful to others but also to elicit Strawson’s certificate of approval; and that hope was realized. In his ‘Reply’ Strawson wrote: ‘Bennett in the first eleven sections of his essay sets out and elaborates the essence of my position with such thorough and sympathetic understanding as to leave me little to say.’ I also tried, unsuccessfully, to analyse with more precision Strawson’s concept of reactive attitude, and to explore the extent of and reasons for the incompatibility between reactive attitudes and the objective attitude. I hoped that the display of my failures would induce Strawson to tackle the problems himself, with more success. No such luck! He wrote: ‘Bennett seeks . . . to produce a tighter and more unified organisation of the phenomena . . . than I achieved in “Freedom and Resentment”’, but he did not return to the fray. On the contrary: ‘It does not seem to me to matter if a strict definition [of ‘reactive’] is not to be had’; and he said nothing about reasons for the reactive/objective conflict. In the present version of the paper, I expound ‘Freedom and Resentment’ much as before. Since my attempts to tighten and deepen the theory failed to hook Strawson, and are not of much intrinsic interest, I now omit them. I shall, however, add an application of the doctrines of ‘Freedom and Resentment’ to the most basic philosophical question regarding punishment.. (shrink)

This paper examines relationships between accountants’ personal values and their moral reasoning. In particular, we hypothesize that there is an inverse relationship between accountants’ “Conformity” values and principled moral reasoning. This investigation is important because the literature suggests that conformity with rule-based standards may be one reason for professional accountants’ relatively lower scores on measures of moral reasoning (Abdolmohammadi et al. J Bus Ethics 16 (1997) 1717). We administered the Rokeach Values Survey (RVS) (Rokeach: 1973, The Nature of Human Values (...) (The Free Press, New York)) and the Defining Issues Test (DIT) (Rest: 1979, Development in Judgment Moral Issues (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN)) to164 graduating accounting students enrolled in capstone courses at two universities in the Northeastern United States. As potential entrants into the accounting profession, these subjects bring their values and moral reasoning to bear on attitudes and behaviors in the workplace. We find a highly significant inverse relationship between “Conformity” values and principled moral reasoning (i.e., those who prefer Conformity values have lower levels of moral reasoning). However, we also find that accounting students as a group do not prefer Conformity values above other values such as Self-actualization and Idealism, and we find positive relationships between Self-actualization and Idealism values and moral reasoning. Implications for values and ethics research are discussed. (shrink)