Three factors considered to potentially influence salespeople's intentions to behave unethically are empirically examined. Although moral judgment is commonly considered a precursor to moral intentions, the effects of cognitive moral development and perceived competitive intensity on moral intentions are not well understood. Results suggest that all three factors influence salespeople's intention to behave unethically. Implications and directions for future research are provided.

Using Reidenbach and Robin‘s ( Journal of Business Ethics 7, 871–879, 1988) multi-criteria ethics instrument, we carried out the first empirical test of Robertson and Crittenden‘s (Strategic Management Journal 24, 385–392, 2003) cross-cultural map of moral philosophies to examine what ethical criteria guide business people in Russia and the U.S. in their intention to behave. Competing divergence and convergence hypotheses were advanced. Our results support a convergence hypothesis, and reveal a common emphasis on relativism. Americans are also influenced (...) by the justice criterion while Russians tend to emphasize utilitarianism. (shrink)

This paper investigates interactive kinds, a class of kinds suggested by Ian Hacking for which classification generates a feedback loop between the classifiers and what is classified, and argues that human interactive kinds should be distinguished from non-human ones. First, I challenge the claim that there is nothing ontologically special about interactive kinds in virtue of their members being classified as such. To do so, I reject Cooper’s counterexample to Hacking’s thesis that kind descriptions are necessary for intentional action, arguing (...) that classification is required for intentional action. Having considered ways to characterise the metaphysics of interactive kinds and the semantics of kind terms, I argue that the fact that classification facilitates intentional action makes human interactive kinds ontologically distinctive because of the anomalous nature of the change which the kind-classification brings about. I then briefly examine further distinguishing features of human interactive kinds. (shrink)

Using information collected from a convenience sample of graduate and undergraduate students affiliated with a Midwestern university in the United States, this study determined the extent to which gender (defined as sex differences) is related to consumers' moral philosophies and ethical intentions. Multivariate and univariate results indicated that women were more inclined than men to utilize both consequence-based and rulebased moral philosophies in questionable consumption situations. In addition, women placed more importance on an overall moral philosophy than did men, and (...) women had higher intentions to behave ethically. The marketing and practical implications of these findings are discussed, and the limitations of the research are presented along with several suggestions for future inquiry, which could advance current understanding of consumer ethics. (shrink)

Using information collected from a convenience sample of graduate and undergraduate students affiliated with a Midwestern university in the United States, this study determined the extent to which gender is related to consumers’ moral philosophies and ethical intentions. Multivariate and univariate results indicated that women were more inclined than men to utilize both consequence-based and rule-based moral philosophies in questionable consumption situations. In addition, women placed more importance on an overall moral philosophy than did men, and women had higher intentions (...) to behave ethically. The marketing and practical implications of these findings are discussed, and the limitations of the research are presented along with several suggestions for future inquiry, which could advance current understanding of consumer ethics. (shrink)

Artificial agents are progressively becoming more present in everyday-life situations and more sophisticated in their interaction affordances. In some specific cases, like Google Duplex, GPT-3 bots or Deep Mind’s AlphaGo Zero, their capabilities reach or exceed human levels. The use contexts of everyday life necessitate making such agents understandable by laypeople. At the same time, displaying human levels of social behavior has kindled the debate over the adoption of Dennett’s ‘intentional stance’. By means of a comparative analysis of the literature (...) on robots and virtual agents, we defend the thesis that approaching these artificial agents ‘as if’ they had intentions and forms of social, goal-oriented rationality is the only way to deal with their complexity on a daily base. Specifically, we claim that this is the only viable strategy for non-expert users to understand, predict and perhaps learn from artificial agents’ behavior in everyday social contexts. Furthermore, we argue that as long as agents are transparent about their design principles and functionality, attributing intentions to their actions is not only essential, but also ethical. Additionally, we propose design guidelines inspired by the debate over the adoption of the intentional stance. (shrink)

Concerns about business ethics have led many business schools to integrate ethics into the curriculum, with mixed results (May, Luth, & Schwoerer 2014, Wang & Calvano 2015, Waples, Antes, Murphy, Connelly & Mumford 2009). This paper seeks to improve our understanding of business students’ ethics by looking into their identity, a cognitive lens by which students see themselves and interpret their environment (Triandis 1989) and that can be relatively malleable to priming and socializing processes (Vignoles, Schwartz, & Luyckx 2011, Ybarra (...) & Trafimow 1998). Results show that undergraduate students with higher individual and lower collective identities report lower intentions to behave ethically. Moreover, our results show that a business education has the power to influence students’ ethical intentions by altering their individual and collective identities. Our results suggest that business schools should consider the effects of their curriculum and pedagogies on the development of individual and collective identities to educate more ethical business students. (shrink)

Given the recent ethics scandals in the United States, there has been a renewed focus on understanding the antecedents to ethical decision-making in the research literature. Since ethical norms and standards of behavior are not universally consistent, an individual’s choice of referent may exert a large influence on his/her ethical decision-making. This study used a social identity theory lens to empirically examine the relative influence of the macro- and micro-level variables of national culture and peers on an individual’s intention (...) to behave ethically. Our sample consisted of respondents from Germany, Italy, and Japan. The results indicated that both national culture and peers were found to act as significant referents in ethical decision-making dilemmas. Although peers exerted a much stronger influence on an individual’s ethical decision-making, the impact of peers varied depending on the national culture levels of individualism and power distance. (shrink)

Nearly all studies of consumers’ willingness to engage in ethical or socially responsible purchasing behavior is based on unconstrained survey response methods. In the present article we ask the question of how well does asking consumers the extent to which they care about a specific social or ethical issue relate to how they would behave in a more constrained environment where there is no socially acceptable response. The results of a comparison between traditional survey questions of “intention to (...) purchase” and estimates of individuals willingness-to-pay for social attributes in products reveal that simple survey questions are too “noisy” to provide operationally meaningful information and overstate intentions to a considerable extent. (shrink)

Recent empirical work calls into question the so-called Simple View that an agent who A’s intentionally intends to A. In experimental studies, ordinary speakers frequently assent to claims that, in certain cases, agents who knowingly behave wrongly intentionally bring about the harm they do; yet the speakers tend to deny that it was the intention of those agents to cause the harm. This paper reports two additional studies that at first appear to support the original ones, but argues (...) that in fact, the evidence of all the studies considered is best understood in terms of the Simple View. (shrink)

A growing body of work has highlighted the importance of political beliefs and attitudes in predicting endorsement and engagement in prosocial behavior. Individuals with right-wing political orientation are less likely to behave prosocially than their left-wing counterparts due to high levels of Right-wing authoritarianism. Here, we aimed to extend prior work by testing how political values relate to COVID-19 discretionary behavioral intentions. Furthermore, we tested whether identification with the national group would influence the relationship between RWA and prosocial behavior. (...) A cross-sectional study conducted on 350 Italian participants showed that right-wing political orientation had a negative effect on COVID-19 discretionary behavioral intentions via RWA. Furthermore, a moderated mediation model revealed that this effect was only significant for participants who are lowly identified with the national group. The results suggest that highlighting group belongingness might effectively motivate more conservative individuals to engage in prosocial behavior. (shrink)

Several meta-analytic studies suggest that individual and contextual factors determine employees’ workplace quitting intentions. Autonomy motivational orientation as an individual factor has many beneficial outcomes, including a reduction in employee turnover intention. However, the studies in this area suggest that the influence is indirect. Grounded in self-determination theory and career stage theory, we hypothesize that the influence of employees’ autonomy motivational disposition on quitting intention is contingent on the level of employees’ age. Results of data collected from 340 (...) engineers, marketing and service personnel from a large public sector undertaking supported our hypothesized model. Employees with high autonomy motivational disposition show less intention to leave the organization when they grow old than young. We conclude by discussing that employees behave for autonomous reasons and show greater organizational identity and less quitting intention with growing age. (shrink)

(1) Intentional system: a system whose behaviour we may reliably predict via the intentional strategy, i.e., by interpreting its behaviour as a (more or less) rational consequence of its beliefs and desires. (2) Reflexive intentional system: a system that is able to interpret itself via the intentional strategy, and whose behaviour is, thus, influenced by an understanding of itself. All intentional systems behave in a meaningful way, but only reflexive intentional systems are aware of the meaning, Hence, only the (...) latter are conscious of what they are doing. (shrink)

Chapter 1 provides a world-semantics for intentional propositional operators. Impossible worlds of various kinds are deployed to ensure that the operators behave in various important ways; notably they fail to be closed under entailment.

We argue that logical expressions in human language enable speakers to perform particular acts as well as stating propositions which may be true or false. We present a conversational action planning model of co-ordinated reasoning, which we use to predict choice of logical expressions in situations in which two people co-operate in the face of risk and uncertainty. We first show how this model predicts preferences for formulations of conditional directives where a principal instructs an agent on how to (...) class='Hi'>behave in a hypothetical situation. Second, we show how this model accounts for choices of quantity and probability expressions that express risk, in situations where a professional advises a client on her options. We conclude that the pragmatic signals encoded in human logical vocabulary can facilitate the co-ordination of social interaction through aiding mutual recognition of intentions on joint projects where collaboration is likely to create value. (shrink)

We investigate the cross-cultural relationships between spirituality and ethical decision-making in Norway and the U.S. Data were collected from business students ( n = 149) at state universities in Norway and the U.S. Results indicate that intention to behave ethically was significantly related to spirituality, national culture, and the influence of peers. Americans were significantly less ethical than Norwegians based on the three dimensions of ethics, yet more spiritual overall. Interestingly, the more spiritual were Norwegians, the more ethical (...) was their decision-making. By contrast, the more spiritual were Americans, the less ethical was their decision-making. The research also found that peer influences were more important to Norwegians than to Americans in making ethical decisions. Finally, spiritual people from the U.S. were more likely to use a universalistic form of justice ethics, as opposed to a more particularistic form of justice ethics used by Norwegians. (shrink)

In this article, we describe the influence of violations of community standards of fairness on subsequent ethical decision-making and emotions. Across two studies, we manipulated explanations for a common action, and we find that explanations that violate community standards of fairness lead to greater intentions to behave unethically than explanations that are consistent with community standards of fairness. We find that perceptions of justifiability mediate this relationship. We also find that individuals derive significant psychological benefits from engaging in unethical (...) behavior following perceived violations of fairness. (shrink)

Providing people with information is considered an important first step in encouraging them to behave sustainably as it influences their consumption beliefs, attitudes and intentions. However, too much information can also complicate these processes and negatively affect behaviour. This is exacerbated when people have accepted the need to live a more sustainable lifestyle and attempt to enact its principles. Drawing on interview data with people committed to sustainability, we identify the contentious role of knowledge in further disrupting sustainable consumption (...) ideals. Here, knowledge is more than just information; it is familiarity and expertise or how information is acted upon. We find that more knowledge represents a source of dilemma, tension and paralysis. Our data reveal a dark side to people’s knowledge, leading to a ‘self-inflicted sustainable consumption paradox’ in their attempts to lead a sustainable consumption lifestyle. Implications for policy interventions are discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:U.S. Organizational Sentencing Guidelines provide firms with incentives to develop formal ethics programs to promote ethical organizational cultures and thereby decrease corporate offenses. Yet critics argue such programs are cosmetic. Here we studied bank employees before and after the introduction of formal ethics training—an important component of formal ethics programs—to examine the effects of training on ethical organizational culture. Two years after a single training session, we find sustained, positive effects on indicators of an ethical organizational culture (observed unethical behavior, (...) intentions to behave ethically, perceptions of organizational efficacy in managing ethics, and the firm’s normative structure). While espoused organizational values also rose in importance post-training, the boost dissipated after the second year which suggests perceptions of values are not driving sustained behavioral improvements. This finding conflicts with past theory which asserts that enduring behavioral improvements arise from the inculcation of organizational values. Implications for future research are discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:U.S. Organizational Sentencing Guidelines provide firms with incentives to develop formal ethics programs to promote ethical organizational cultures and thereby decrease corporate offenses. Yet critics argue such programs are cosmetic. Here we studied bank employees before and after the introduction of formal ethics training—an important component of formal ethics programs—to examine the effects of training on ethical organizational culture. Two years after a single training session, we find sustained, positive effects on indicators of an ethical organizational culture (observed unethical behavior, (...) intentions to behave ethically, perceptions of organizational efficacy in managing ethics, and the firm’s normative structure). While espoused organizational values also rose in importance post-training, the boost dissipated after the second year which suggests perceptions of values are not driving sustained behavioral improvements. This finding conflicts with past theory which asserts that enduring behavioral improvements arise from the inculcation of organizational values. Implications for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Today, technological implants to increase innate human capabilities are already available on the market. Cyborgs, understood as healthy people who decide to integrate their bodies with insideable technology, are no longer science fiction, but fact. The cyborg market will be a huge new business with important consequences for both industry and society. More specifically, cyborg technologies are a unique product, with a potentially critical impact on the future of humanity. In light of the potential transformations involved in the creation of (...) “superhuman” cyborgs, ethics must be a cornerstone of cyborg marketing decisions. Businesses need to take ethics into account, not only to ensure they behave ethically, as always, but also because ethics will be an important factor in buyers’ decisions in the emerging cyborg market. This is because the decision to become a cyborg is determined, among many other factors, by ethical judgment. Our research focuses on how the dimensions of the Composite Multidimensional Ethics Scale influence an individual’s decision to become a cyborg. To test our hypotheses, we surveyed a total of 1563 higher-education students in seven different countries. The results of the survey show that ethical judgment will be a keystone in individual cyborgization. Specifically, ethical dimensions explained 48% of the intention to use cyborg technologies. The ethical analysis showed that not all MES dimensions have the same influence on the ethical judgment regarding this decision. Egoism was the most influential dimension, while contractualism was the least. These findings have important implications for both academia and business. (shrink)

Today, technological implants to increase innate human capabilities are already available on the market. Cyborgs, understood as healthy people who decide to integrate their bodies with insideable technology, are no longer science fiction, but fact. The cyborg market will be a huge new business with important consequences for both industry and society. More specifically, cyborg technologies are a unique product, with a potentially critical impact on the future of humanity. In light of the potential transformations involved in the creation of (...) “superhuman” cyborgs, ethics must be a cornerstone of cyborg marketing decisions. Businesses need to take ethics into account, not only to ensure they behave ethically, as always, but also because ethics will be an important factor in buyers’ decisions in the emerging cyborg market. This is because the decision to become a cyborg is determined, among many other factors, by ethical judgment. Our research focuses on how the dimensions of the Composite Multidimensional Ethics Scale influence an individual’s decision to become a cyborg. To test our hypotheses, we surveyed a total of 1563 higher-education students in seven different countries. The results of the survey show that ethical judgment will be a keystone in individual cyborgization. Specifically, ethical dimensions explained 48% of the intention to use cyborg technologies. The ethical analysis showed that not all MES dimensions have the same influence on the ethical judgment regarding this decision. Egoism was the most influential dimension, while contractualism was the least. These findings have important implications for both academia and business. (shrink)

Work-integrated learning is an educational approach that aims to support students’ integration of theory to practice. These rich learning opportunities provide students with real-world experiences and introduce practice and ethical situations that help consolidate and bridge their knowledge and skill. Academic integrity has been defined as the ongoing commitment to values that are consistent with ethical practice: honesty, trust, fairness, respect, responsibility, and courage. It is important to understand what specifically influences students’ intentions to behave with integrity in WIL (...) settings. This paper reports on one study that explored predictors to students’ intentions to behave with integrity across three different WIL settings in their upper years of studies. The findings and recommendations from the research may help to inform other professional programs that include WIL through their educational offerings. (shrink)

In this comparative survey of 191 Egyptian and 92 U.S. executives, we explore the relationship between national culture and ethical decision-making within the context of business. Using Reidenbach and Robin’s (1988) multi-criteria ethics instrument, we examine how differences on two of Hofstede’s national culture dimensions, individualism/collectivism, and power distance, are related to the manner in which business practitioners make ethical decisions. Egypt and the U.S. provide an interesting comparison because of the extreme differences in their economies and related business development. (...) Our results indicate that respondents from the U.S, individualistic and low in power distance, were likely to view the decision making outcome in ethics scenarios as more unethical than the more collectivistic and high power distance Egyptians, when applying ethical criteria based on justice, utilitarianism, relativism, and (contrary to our predictions) egoism. However, we also found that both Egyptians and Americans rely on justice, utilitarianism, and relativism in predicting their intentions to behave ethically, and that Americans substitute egoism for justice, when the behavioral intentions of peers are examined. (shrink)

We extend the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) for ethics in the workplace. Using a path modeling methodology, we find evidence that, for ethics, moral disengagement is an antecedent to the TPB predictors of attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control (PBC). We show that the TPB predictors mediate the influence moral disengagement has on ethical behavioral intentions. Thus, to improve ethical behavior, reducing moral disengagement is critical. We find support for including both types of PBC (self-efficacy and locus of (...) control) when modeling ethical behavior. We use four ethics scenarios and international data to test this model. We also evaluate potential positive influences on ethics in the workplace and find that recency of ethics training interacts with religiosity and activates it to reduce moral disengagement. We also find that principles-based ethics training enhances professionals’ self-efficacy to behave ethically. Experience, including time as a member in a professional accounting organization, increases both locus of control and self-efficacy to behave ethically. These variables—recency of ethical training, religiosity, principles-based professional ethics training, and experience—influence parts of the core TPB model, which in turn lead to improved ethical behavioral intentions. (shrink)

This study investigates the relationship between intention to behave ethically and gender within the context of national culture. Using Reidenbach and Robin's measures of the ethical dimensions of justice and utilitarianism in a sample of business students from three different countries, we found that gender is significantly related to the respondents' intention to behave ethically. Women relied on both justice as well as utilitarianism when making moral decisions. By contrast, men relied only on justice, and did (...) not rely on utilitarianism when faced with the same ethical issues. Further, women's intention to behave was contextual, significantly affected by two national culture dimensions (uncertainty avoidance and individualism), whereas men's decisions were more universal, and not related to national culture dimensions. (shrink)

This study investigates the relationship between intention to behave ethically and gender within the context of national culture. Using Reidenbach and Robin's measures of the ethical dimensions of justice and utilitarianism in a sample of business students from three different countries, we found that gender is significantly related to the respondents' intention to behave ethically. Women relied on both justice as well as utilitarianism when making moral decisions. By contrast, men relied only on justice, and did (...) not rely on utilitarianism when faced with the same ethical issues. Further, women's intention to behave was contextual, significantly affected by two national culture dimensions (uncertainty avoidance and individualism), whereas men's decisions were more universal, and not related to national culture dimensions. (shrink)

This paper presents an experiential exercise introducing the concept of the personal ethical threshold (PET) to help explain why moral behavior does not always follow moral intention. An individual’s PET represents the individual’s vulnerability to situational factors, i.e., how little or much it takes for members of organizations to cross their proverbial line to act in a way they deem unethical. The PET reflects the interplay among the situation, the particular ethical issue, and the individual. Exploring the PET can (...) help account for why some people are sometimes able to withstand substantial organizational pressures to behave in congruence with their ethical intentions, whereas others crumble in the face of apparently minimal situational forces. We hope that students’ exposure to and subsequent reflection upon their PET, by means of the exercise we present, will foster the development of their moral courage. (shrink)

Quantification, Negation, and Focus: Challenges at the Conceptual-Intentional Semantic Interface Tista Bagchi National Institute of Science, Technology, and Development Studies (NISTADS) and the University of Delhi Since the proposal of Logical Form (LF) was put forward by Robert May in his 1977 MIT doctoral dissertation and was subsequently adopted into the overall architecture of language as conceived under Government-Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981), there has been a steady research effort to determine the nature of LF in language in light of structurally (...) diverse languages around the world, which has ultimately contributed to the reinterpretation of LF as a Conceptual-Intentional (C-I) interface level between the computational syntactic component of the faculty of language and one or more interpretive faculties of the human mind. While this has opened up further possibilities of research in phenomena such as quantifier scope and scope interactions between negation, quantification, and focus, it has also given rise to a few real challenges to linguistic theory as well. Some of these are: (i) the split between lexical meaning – a matter supposedly belonging to the phase-wise selection of lexical arrays – and issues of semantic interpretation that arise purely from binding and scope phenomena (Mukherji 2010); (ii) partially relatedly, the level at which theta role assignment can be argued to take place, an issue that is taken up by me in Bagchi (2007); and (iii) how supposedly “pure” scopal phenomena relating to quantifiers, negation, and emphasizing expressions such as only and even (comparable to, e.g., Urdu/Hindi hii and bhii, Bangla –i and –o) also have dimensions of both focus and discourse reference. While recognizing all of these challenges, this talk aims to highlight particularly challenge (iii), both in terms of scholarship in the past and for the rich prospects for research on languages of south Asia with the semantics of quantification, negation, and focus in view. The scholarship of the past that I seek to relate this issue to is where, parallel to (and largely independently of) the research on LF that had been happening, Barwise and Cooper were developing their influential view of noun phrases as generalized quantifiers, culminating in their key 1981 article “Generalized Quantifiers and Natural Language” while, independently, McCawley, in his 1981 book Everything that Linguists have Always Wanted to Know about Logic, established through argumentation that all noun phrases semantically behave like generalized quantified expressions (further elaborated by him in the second – 1994 – revised edition of his book). I seek to demonstrate, based on limited data analysis from selected languages of south Asia, that our current understanding of quantification, negation, and focus under the Minimalist view owes something significant to the two major, but now largely marginalized, works of scholarship, and that for the way forward it is essential to adopt a more formal-semantic approach as adopted by them and also by later works such as Denis Bouchard’s (1995) The Semantics of Syntax, Mats Rooth’s work on focus (e.g., Rooth 1996, “Focus” in Shalom Lappin’s Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory), Heim and Kratzer’s Semantics in Generative Grammar (1998), and Yoad Winter’s (2002) Linguistic Inquiry article on semantic number, to cite just a few instances. (shrink)

In this article, we describe the influence of violations of community standards of fairness (Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler, 1986a) on subsequent ethical decision-making and emotions. Across two studies, we manipulated explanations for a common action, and we find that explanations that violate community standards of fairness (e.g., by taking advantage of an in crease in market power) lead to greater intentions to behave unethically than explanations that are consistent with community standards of fairness (e.g., by passing along a price (...) increase). We find that perceptions of justifiability mediate this relationship. We also find that individuals derive significant psychological benefits (greater satisfaction, greater happiness, and reduced anger) from engaging in unethical behavior following perceived violations of fairness. (shrink)

On the face of it, in ordinary practices of rational assessment, we criticize agents both for the combinations of attitudes, like belief, desire, and intention, that they possess at particular times, and for the ways that they behave cognitively over time, by forming, reconsidering, and updating those attitudes. Accordingly, philosophers have proposed norms of rationality that are synchronic—concerned fundamentally with our individual time-slices, and diachronic—concerned with our temporally extended behaviour. However, a recent movement in epistemology has cast doubt (...) on the very existence of requirements of the latter type. My aim in this paper is to address what I take to be the most direct and general recent attack on diachronic epistemic rationality, the arguments for so-called ‘time-slice epistemology’ by Brian Hedden. I argue that Hedden's attempt to motivate the rejection of diachronic rational norms ultimately fails, and in particular that an independently attractive view about the nature of such norms, namely one on which such norms govern processes, escapes his assault unscathed. (shrink)

This essay is part of a larger project aimed at making sense of rational thought and agency as part of the natural world. It provides a semantic framework for thinking about the contents of: 1) descriptive thoughts and sentences having a representational or mind-to-world direction of fit, and which manifest our capacity for theoretical rationality; and 2) prescriptive and intentional sentences having an expressive or world-to-mind direction of fit, and which manifest our capacity for practical rationality. I use a modified (...) version of Allan Gibbard’s hyperstate semantics, employing both maximally determinate possible worlds and maximally determinate plans of action, as a basis for providing a unified understanding of moral judgments and expressions of individual and collective intentionality – they one and all give voice to our ability as rational agents to adopt the perspectives of various individuals within a community and consider how we would behave were we in their positions. In the course of spelling out the view I draw on and criticize ideas that Wilfrid Sellars advanced in the middle of the 20th century, while employing the tools of contemporary modal logic and model-theoretic semantics to give perspicuous formulation to his thought that the moral judgment ‘one ought to do A’ should be understood in terms of the collective intention ‘we shall do A’, where the pronoun denotes the unrestricted class of rational agents and the ‘ought’ is in some sense unconditionally binding. (shrink)

Autonomous vehicles —and accidents they are involved in—attest to the urgent need to consider the ethics of artificial intelligence. The question dominating the discussion so far has been whether we want AVs to behave in a ‘selfish’ or utilitarian manner. Rather than considering modeling self-driving cars on a single moral system like utilitarianism, one possible way to approach programming for AI would be to reflect recent work in neuroethics. The agent–deed–consequence model :3–20, 2014a, Behav Brain Sci 37:487–488, 2014b) provides (...) a promising descriptive and normative account while also lending itself well to implementation in AI. The ADC model explains moral judgments by breaking them down into positive or negative intuitive evaluations of the agent, deed, and consequence in any given situation. These intuitive evaluations combine to produce a positive or negative judgment of moral acceptability. For example, the overall judgment of moral acceptability in a situation in which someone committed a deed that is judged as negative would be mitigated if the agent had good intentions and the action had a good consequence. This explains the considerable flexibility and stability of human moral judgment that has yet to be replicated in AI. This paper examines the advantages and disadvantages of implementing the ADC model and how the model could inform future work on ethics of AI in general. (shrink)

While nurses can and do behave as intentional political agents, claims that nurses collectively do , should or must act to advance political objectives lack credibility. This paper challenges the coherence and legitimacy of political demands placed upon nurses. It is not suggested that nurses ought not to contribute to political discourse and activity. That would be foolish. However, the idea that nursing can own or exhibit a general political will is discarded. It is suggested that to protect and (...) advance political discussion, to aid explanatory adequacy and clarity, the form in which nursing associates itself with political claims merits critical appraisal. Thus significant numbers of nurses probably reject or disagree with many of the political claims that attach to them – claims often made on their behalf. More specifically, the individual beliefs and goals of nurses can be in conflict with the political pronouncements of nursing scholars and organizations . It is proposed that nurses need not share substantive normative beliefs/goals and, if this proposal holds, group descriptors such as ‘nurses’ and ‘nursing’ cannot meaningfully or easily attach to political claims. Shared value theory is linked to the fallacy of composition and the concept of collective ascription error is introduced to explore the implausibility of using group descriptors such as ‘nurses’ and ‘nursing’ to refer to the beliefs/goals of all nurses. (shrink)

The presence of intelligence and rationality in Artificial Intelligence and the Internet requires a new context of analysis in which Herbert Simon’s approach to the sciences of the artificial is surpassed in order to grasp the role of information in our contemporary setting. This new framework requires taking into account some relevant aspects. In the historical endeavor of building up AI and the Internet, minds and machines have interacted over the years and in many ways through the interrelation between scientific (...) creativity and technological innovation. Philosophically, minds and machines can have epistemological, methodological and ontological differences, which are based on the distinct configuration of human intelligence and artificial intelligence. Their comparison with rationality and its various forms is particularly relevant. Scientifically, AI and the Internet belong to the sciences of the artificial, because they work on designs that search for specific aims, following selected processes in order to achieve expected results. Technologically, AI and the Internet require the support of information and communication technologies. These have an instrumental role regarding the existence of AI and the Internet. Also ICT shape their diverse forms of configuration over the years.Within this framework, this paper offers a new context of analysis that goes beyond Simon’s and follows four main steps: the interaction between scientific creativity and technological innovation as the philosophico-methodological setting for Artificial Intelligence and the Internet; artificial intelligence and human intelligence as epistemological basis for machines and minds, where the differences between artificial intelligence and human intelligence are made explicit and the analysis of minds and machines is made from the perspective of rationality ; intention and its difference with design of machine learning are considered to distinguish human intelligence from artificial intelligence; and the internal and external aspects of artificial designs in contemporary society are considered through the perspective of rationality, which leads to the transition from intelligence to rationality in the Internet as well as to the historicity of information. (shrink)

Chimpanzees and humans are close evolutionary relatives who behave in many of the same ways based on a similar type of agentive organization. To what degree do they experience the world in similar ways as well? Using contemporary research in evolutionarily biology and animal cognition, I explicitly compare the kinds of experience the two species of capable of having. I conclude that chimpanzees’ experience of the world, their experiential niche as I call it, is: intentional in basically the same (...) way as humans’; rational in the sense that it is self-critical and operates with logically structured causal and intentional inferences; but not normative at all in that it does not operate with “objective” evaluative standards. Scientific data do not answer philosophical questions, but they provide rich raw material for scientists and philosophers alike to reflect on and clarify fundamental psychological concepts. (shrink)

Accidents involving large trucks result in significant economic and social costs. As technological solutions have improved, behavioral factors contributing to accidents have risen in importance. The purpose of this research is to investigate how norms, consequences, and personal attitudes influence safety-related ethical judgments and behavioral intentions. The Hunt–Vitell’s theory of ethical decision-making is adapted to test how these factors influence truck drivers’ decisions containing ethical content. Professional truck drivers evaluated decisions presented in two scenarios that included the situation, the decision, (...) and the results. The research found that drivers rely heavily on evaluations of safety norms when forming ethical judgments and behavioral intentions. Further, drivers’ attitudes toward compliance and the effectiveness of safety regulations also influenced decision-making to an extent. Overall, evidence of a refutation of the assumption that a tradeoff exists between operational productivity and safety was discovered. Drivers in this study intended to behave in a certain manner irrespective of time or money pressures. The perceived ethical component of the decision outweighed regulatory and economic consequences under a range of parameters. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that even if we hold that at least some paternalistic behaviour is impermissible when directed towards innocent persons, in certain cases, the same behaviour is permissible when directed towards criminal offenders. I also defend the claim that in some cases it is morally preferable to behave paternalistically towards offenders as an alternative to traditional methods of punishment. I propose that the reason paternalistic behaviour is sometimes permissible towards an offender is the same reason that (...) inflicting intentional harm on an offender is permissible – namely, that it is sometimes a morally justified method of punishing an offender for his wrongdoing. (shrink)

In this paper Sullins argues that in certain circumstances robots can be seen as real moral agents. A distinction is made between persons and moral agents such that, it is not necessary for a robot to have personhood in order to be a moral agent. I detail three requirements for a robot to be seen as a moral agent. The first is achieved when the robot is significantly autonomous from any programmers or operators of the machine. The second is when (...) one can analyze or explain the robot's behavior only by ascribing to it some predisposition or 'intention' to do good or harm. And finally, robot moral agency requires the robot to behave in a way that shows and understanding of responsibility to some other moral agent. Robots with all of these criteria will have moral rights as well as responsibilities regardless of their status as persons. (shrink)

We consider the evolutionary scheme of morality proposed by Tomasello to defend the idea that the ability to orient the learning of offspring using signs of approval/disapproval could be a decisive and necessary step in the evolution of human morality. Those basic forms of intentional evaluative feedback, something we have called assessor teaching, allow parents to transmit their accumulated experience to their children, both about the behaviors that should be learned as well as how they should be copied. The rationale (...) underlying this process is as follows: if a behavior is approved, then it is good; if it is disapproved, then it is bad. The evaluative guidance on how to behave most probably spread among peers in situations of mutual benefit, such as cooperative child rearing. We argue that our hominin ancestors provided with this capacity for assessor teaching were ideally positioned to develop the two specifically human levels of morality proposed by Tomasello: the morality of fairness and the morality of justice. Assessor teaching could have facilitated the genesis of rudimentary codes of behavior tied with the need to agree about how to behave to succeed in joint cooperative activities. Moreover, learning through assessor teaching provides a plausible explanation for the origin of the objectivist and prescriptive dimensions of human morality. First, we emphasize that individuals feel that they evaluate the behavior of others objectively to guide their learning, and, second, we underline the imperative intention that any moral manifestation possesses. (shrink)

This paper critically assesses John Danaher’s ‘ethical behaviourism’, a theory on how the moral status of robots should be determined. The basic idea of this theory is that a robot’s moral status is determined decisively on the basis of its observable behaviour. If it behaves sufficiently similar to some entity that has moral status, such as a human or an animal, then we should ascribe the same moral status to the robot as we do to this human or animal. The (...) paper argues against ethical behaviourism by making four main points. First, it is argued that the strongest version of ethical behaviourism understands the theory as relying on inferences to the best explanation when inferring moral status. Second, as a consequence, ethical behaviourism cannot stick with merely looking at the robot’s behaviour, while remaining neutral with regard to the difficult question of which property grounds moral status. Third, not only behavioural evidence ought to play a role in inferring a robot’s moral status, but knowledge of the design process of the robot and of its designer’s intention ought to be taken into account as well. Fourth, knowledge of a robot’s ontology and how that relates to human biology often is epistemically relevant for inferring moral status as well. The paper closes with some concluding observations. (shrink)

Most moral and political theories take agency to have special moral value, and to make the bearers of agency therefore worthy of particular moral concern. To be deprived of agency is to be wronged, and to be considered incapable of agency is to be denied respect. Thus, there is morally a lot at stake in how we conceptualize agency. Standard theories of agency, such as Bratman’s, focus on the individual use of practical reason through intention, planning, and goal-oriented action. (...) On this account there are many lack agency, however, such as, extremely poor persons, mentally disabled persons, and traditional, collectivist cultures. Instead of understanding the core of agency to lie in the use of goal-oriented reasoning, I argue that we should locate it in norm-guided and –guiding behavior. In this paper I sketch such an alternative account. On this picture agency is more of a collective than an individual achievement. Although not all norms and traditions are morally valuable, the ability to behave in norm-guided and –guiding ways is especially valuable because it enables higher order cognitive abilities and moral action. Goal-directed agency can be seen as a special case of basic agency, given norms of rationality and planning. (shrink)

Moral licensing theory suggests that observers may liberate actors to behave in morally questionable ways due to the actors’ history of moral behaviors. Drawing on this view, a scenario experiment with a 2 (high vs. low ethical)×2 (internal vs. external motivation) between-subject design (N = 455) was conducted in the current study. We examined whether prior ethical leader behaviors cause subordinates to license subsequent abusive supervision, as well as the moderating role of behavior motivation on such effects. The results (...) showed that when supervisors demonstrated prior ethical behaviors, subordinates, as victims, liberated them to act in abusive ways. Specifically, subordinates showed high levels of tolerance and low levels of condemnation towards abusive supervision and seldom experienced emotional responses to supervisors’ abusive behaviors. Moreover, subordinates tended to attribute abusive supervision, viewed as a kind of mistreatment without an immediate intent to cause harm, to characteristics of the victims and of the organization rather than of the supervisors per se. When supervisors behaved morally out of internal rather than external motivations, the aforementioned licensing effects were stronger. (shrink)

There is a widely accepted view in action theory (most prominently defended by Donald Davidson) according to which (1) actions are events, (2) reasons are intentional attitudes of the agent (pairs of beliefs and desires), and (3) acting for a reason entails that the reason rationalizes as well as causes the action. In the first part of my contribution I list seventeen difficulties for this standard account; in the second part I give an outline of how a more plausible conception (...) of reasons and actions could look like. According to this conception, which is based on Gilbert Ryle’s criticism of a mechanistic understanding of psychological concepts, agency is due to a special kind of disposition of the agent, namely the disposition to behave as if the agent were permanently deliberating about what to do. The conception has surprising consequences for the ontological status of intentional attitudes and actions and for the relationship between action and responsibility. (shrink)

THE PRESENT SITUATION in the philosophy of mind may be roughly summed up in three generalizations. First, Cartesian dualism is no longer widely accepted as a genuine option. For many reasons it is no longer taken seriously by experimental psychologists. Perhaps their best reason is that the dualistic hypothesis can provide no satisfactory explanation of behavior since it would seem to make no sense to ascribe to an immaterial substance an internal structure and activity which could be causally linked to (...) behavior. Among philosophers, A. J. Ayer has expressed a characteristic attitude in his admission that he does not find the hypothesis intelligible. Second, a version of materialism, let us call it physicalism, is now being taken seriously as an alternative to Cartesian dualism. According to this version, while it is admitted that mentalistic discourse may not be logically reducible to physicalistic discourse, nevertheless all true statements about the mind are in fact either statements about the behavior of the human body and its organs or about tendencies to behave. Finally, the concept of action has come to the forefront of discussion, and it is being explored primarily by those who reject Cartesian dualism but find something wrong with physicalism. Here is an attempt to construct an alternative to both views by developing a new kind of dualism, namely a distinction between persons as physical organisms and persons as agents, as beings who can act and who have intentions, motives, reasons, desires, and so forth. According to this view, persons are creatures to whom it is essential that teleological concepts apply, and teleological discourse and modes of explanation are not reducible, either logically or empirically, to physicalistic discourse and modes of explanation. Advocates of the new dualism are just as anxious to deny the existence of a ghost in the machine as are the materialists. But, to state roughly what they are after, it is claimed that there are at least two mutually exclusive language games or conceptual schemes which we use to talk about human beings. They are exclusive not in the sense of being about different entities but in the sense of using methods of explanation and concepts which are contextually incompatible with one another. To understand an agent's actions in terms of his intentions and motives is to rule out in that particular context a causal-physiological explanation. Physicalism ignores or fails to appreciate what is distinctively psychological in human life. (shrink)

In this essay I defend a theory of psychological explanation that is based on the joint commitment to direct reference and computationalism. I offer a new solution to the problem of Frege Cases. Frege Cases involve agents who are unaware that certain expressions corefer (e.g. that 'Cicero' and 'Tully' corefer), where such knowledge is relevant to the success of their behavior, leading to cases in which the agents fail to behave as the intentional laws predict. It is generally agreed (...) that Frege Cases are a major problem, if not the major problem, that this sort of theory faces. In this essay, I hope to show that the theory can surmount the Frege Cases. (shrink)

The article starts by offering a definition of fake kindness focused on the dissociation between the behavioural components of kindness and the intent to sincerely pay some heed to the needs of others. Using the sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu, this definition is then used to articulate how fake kindness can be conceptualized as a specific form of symbolic violence. Such a view allows explanations as to how and why the prevalence and effectiveness of fake kindness vary according to microsociological (...) norms and values. The generic definition and conceptualization of fake kindness as a form of symbolic violence are then used to discuss how nursing’s enthrallment with the concept of caring and its operationalization as a moral compass likely fosters the growth of fake kindness within the profession. In this view, the institutional enforcement of propriety and well-behaved professionalism is more likely to lead to toxic environments than to healthy workplaces. We hope that being able to understand how professional norms and institutional rules are sometimes turned into social tools to enforce obedience and existing hierarchies can empower victims of those phenomena to resist them more effectively. It might also contribute to increasing the awareness of well-meaning nurses or people in position of authority who have been socialized in environments where fake kindness is normalized. (shrink)

Lisa Kemmerer | : This article explores whether or not animal activists who engage in violence might legitimately be labelled “terrorists.” To this end, I examine common assumptions concerning the use of pre-emptive counter-violence in order to defend the comparatively defenceless. Through the use of casuistry, this essay compares specific hypothetical instances of killing comparatively defenceless individuals, beginning with scenarios that offer a clear general consensus, moving to more controversial cases. This indicates that contemporary violence on behalf of animal liberation, (...) often assumed to be rash and radical, is actually quite restrained. The intent of this paper is not to make claims as to how liberationists ought to behave, but rather to highlight egregious inconsistencies in our attitudes toward violence on behalf of those who are comparatively defenceless. | : Cet article vise à déterminer si les activistes animaliers qui se livrent à des actes violents doivent légitimement ou non être taxés de « terroristes ». À cette fin, j’examine les idées courantes relatives à l’utilisation de la violence préventive dans le but de défendre des êtres qui sont relativement sans défense. À l’aide de la casuistique, cet essai compare des exemples hypothétiques spécifiques de meurtres d’individus relativement sans défense, en commençant avec des scénarios qui offrent un consensus général clair, pour passer ensuite à des cas plus controversés. Cette recherche montre que la violence contemporaine perpétrée au nom de la libération des animaux, que l’on considère souvent comme étant téméraire et radicale, est en fait assez retenue. L’objectif de cet article ne consiste pas à prendre position au sujet de la façon dont les libérationnistes devraient se comporter, mais plutôt à mettre en évidence les incohérences flagrantes de nos attitudes face à la violence perpétrée au nom des êtres qui sont relativement sans défense. (shrink)

The detection of a human’s intended behavior is one of the most important skills that a social robot should have in order to become acceptable as a part of human society, because humans are used to understand the actions of other humans in a goal-directed manner and they will expect the social robot to behave similarly. A breakthrough in this area can advance several research branches related to social intelligence such as learning by imitation and mutual adaptation. To achieve (...) this goal the robot needs to integrate all possible evidence of intention and neglect the unintended behavior, and a complete solution should use low-level signal processing and high-level reasoning. This work explores the low-level signal processing part of the solution by proposing an interactive adaptive perception scheme that uses four important features of human behavior to amplify the signals originating from intended behavior with respect to signals originating from unintended behavior and other noise sources such as instrumental noise. This work follows the vision that intelligence is not only a function of a centralized sophisticated artificial brain, but can be presented in different forms in the entire robot including its perception and motion systems (the mind is not contained in the brain, but distributed in every cell in the body). A simple example of using the proposed scheme was implemented and the results of two experiments with it are also presented. (shrink)

Are predictions about how one will freely and intentionally behave in the future ever relevant to how one ought to behave? There is good reason to think they are. As imperfect agents, we have responsibilities of self-management, which seem to require that we take account of the predictable ways we're liable to go wrong. I defend this conclusion against certain objections to the effect that incorporating predictions concerning one's voluntary conduct into one's practical reasoning amounts to evading responsibility (...) for that conduct. There is, however, some truth to this sort of objection. To understand the legitimate role of self-prediction in practical reasoning, we need to distinguish instances of coping responsibly with an anticipated failure to behave as one ought, on the one hand, from mere acquiescence in one's flaws, on the other. I argue that, to draw this distinction, we must recognize certain limits on the use of self-prediction as a ground of choice. (shrink)