The American Institute of certified public accountants (AICPA) has promulgated a Code of Professional Conduct, which has served as the primary ethical standard for public accountants in the United States for more than 20 years. It is now out of date and needs to be replaced with a code of ethics. Just as U.S. generally accepted accounting principles are being migrated toward "principles-based accounting" as part of a convergence with international financial reporting standards, a similar process needs to occur with (...) ethics. This article organizes the primary rules of the AICPA Code around five essential virtues: objectivity, integrity, inquisitiveness, loyalty, and trustworthiness. These virtues correspond to the general principles set forth in the Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants of the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC). From this virtue ethics perspective, various rules of the AICPA Code are critiqued as being inadequate at best, and poorly crafted at worst. The article concludes with the proposition that principles-based ethics serves the profession and the financial reporting process better than the current rules-based approach. (shrink)

A bivalent valuation is snt iff sound (standard PC inference rules take truths only into truths) and non-trivial (not all wffs are assigned the same truth value). Such a valuation is normal iff classically correct for each connective. Carnap knew that there were non-normal snt valuations of PC, and that the gap they revealed between syntax and semantics could be "jumped" as follows. Let $VAL_{snt}$ be the set of snt valuations, and $VAL_{nrm}$ be the set of normal ones. The bottom (...) row in the table for the wedge 'v' is not semantically determined by $VAL_{snt}$ , but if one deletes from $VAL_{snt}$ all those valuations that are not classically correct at the aforementioned row, one jumps straights to $VAL_{nrm}$ and thus to classical semantics. The conjecture we call semantic holism claims that the same thing happens for any semantic indeterminacy in any row in the table of any connective of PC, i.e., to remove it is to jump straight to classical semantics. We show (i) why semantic holism is plausible and (ii) why it is nevertheless false. And (iii) we pose a series of questions concerning the number of possible steps or jumps between the indeterminate semantics given by $VAL_{snt}$ and classical semantics given by $VAL_{nrm}$. (shrink)

The article defends ethical vegetarianism, which, for present purposes, is stipulatively taken to be the view that it is morally wrong to eat animals when equally nutritious plant-based foods are available. Several examples are introduced to show that we all agree that animals deserve some direct moral consideration and to help identify and clarify several commonsense moral principles—principles we all accept. These principles are then used to argue that eating animals is morally wrong. Since you no doubt accept these principles, (...) the argument demonstrates that consistency with your own beliefs and values commits you to the immorality of eating meat and requires you to alter your eating behavior accordingly. [Article available online at no cost at links listed above.]. (shrink)

[Aristotle and Theophrastus as creators of Milesian philosophy].

This study was a preliminary exploration of the value changes taking place in the United States since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, which was a significant emotional event or cultural upheaval. Rokeach told us that "a person's total value system may undergo change as a result of socialization, therapy, or cultural upheaval..." (Rokeach, The Nature of Human Values, 1973, p. 37). The researchers explored the value changes of 500 aviation industry employees (...) before the attack and 500 after the attack. The statistically significant research results showed a total of twenty-seven of thirty-six values changed. Before the attack respondents valued much higher self-esteem and self-actualization values like A Sense of Accomplishment and Self-Respect. After the attack respondents placed a much higher value importance on survival, safety and security values like A World at Peace, Freedom, Family Security, National Security, Mature Love, Salvation, and True Friendship. (shrink)

Much critical attention to the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason is devoted to two related concerns. The first is Kant's skeptical attack on the claims of pure reason to epistemic authority, where the focus is on the paralogisms and the antinomies of pure reason. The second involves Kant's refutation of idealism. These two concerns are of course intimately connected with one another and there are various ways to express that interconnection. Perhaps most generally it can be said that (...) Kant's assessment of reason in these two contexts is negative: it argues for the limitation of reason's claim to unbridled application and views reason as a faculty whose native propensity to seek such employment must be checked. Reason, as it turns out, is the great metaphysical impostor, whose representations, the ideas, have no epistemic warrant whatsoever. For it is the essence of Kant's position in the Dialectic that metaphysical conundra cannot be solved so long as reason arrogates to itself a direct and unrestricted epistemic or cognitive role and that reason ought to forebear from assigning itself any such status. Such a self-restriction of reason is, additionally, transcendentally necessary because it is that very limitation, Kant argues, that constitutes transcendental critique. (shrink)

Hartry Field has suggested that we should adopt at least a methodological deflationism: "[W]e should assume full-fledged deflationism as a working hypothesis. That way, if full-fledged deflationism should turn out to be inadequate, we will at least have a clearer sense than we now have of just where it is that inflationist assumptions... are needed". I argue here that we do not need to be methodological deflationists. More precisely, I argue that we have no need for a disquotational truth-predicate; that (...) the word 'true', in ordinary language, is not a disquotational truth-predicate; and that it is not at all clear that it is even possible to introduce a disquotational truth-predicate into ordinary language. If so, then we have no clear sense how it is even possible to be a methodological deflationist. My goal here is not to convince a committed deflationist to abandon his or her position. My goal, rather, is to argue, contrary to what many seem to think, that reflection on the apparently trivial character of T-sentences should not incline us to deflationism. (shrink)

This article explores the philosophies of Heidegger and Wittgenstein to illustrate the thesis that philosophy is a human activity exhibiting a unity of investigative and therapeutic aims. For both philosophers, the purpose of philosophical concepts is to point toward a path of transformation rather than to explain. For both, a first step on this path is the recognition of constraining illusions, whether conventional or metaphysical. For both, such illusions are sedimented in linguistic practices, and for both, philosophical investigation is a (...) way of emancipating thought and life from illusion by bringing what is already prereflectively understood into the light of thematic explicitness. And what both philosophers bring into thematic explicitness are aspects of the context-embeddedness and finitude of human existence. It is hoped that comparing the works of these two philosophers will unveil features of each that are more difficult to discern in the works of either considered in isolation. (shrink)

Philosophical defenses of cognitive/evolutionary psychological accounts of racialism claim that classification based on phenotypical features of humans was common historically and is evidence for a species-typical, cognitive mechanism for essentializing. They conclude that social constructionist accounts of racialism must be supplemented by cognitive/evolutionary psychology. This article argues that phenotypical classifications were uncommon historically until such classifications were socially constructed. Moreover, some philosophers equivocate between two different meanings of “racial thinking.” The article concludes that social constructionist accounts are far more robust (...) than psychological accounts for the origins of racialism. (shrink)

Although Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus disagree over how the acquired moral virtues are connected, the nature of their disagreement is difficult to determine. They and their contemporaries reject the Stoic understanding of this connection, according to which someone either possesses all the acquired moral virtues in the highest degree or none of these virtues at all. Both Thomas and Scotus hold that someone might generally perform just actions and yet be unchaste. Moreover, although they interpret Aristotle differently, both (...) accept the Aristotelian view that a good person is free from vice and that his virtues are connected through prudence. They agree that the just but unchaste person is not a good person. But a major difference between the two is in their understanding of the way in which the virtues are so connected and their manner of describing that imperfect or partial prudence which is possessed by such a person who does not have each of the major virtues. (shrink)

Ethics practice is both relative and situational. Perhaps there is an area of no greater demonstration of these realities than where an organization, be it a public governmental entity and/or a quasi-governmental entity with government contracts has the duty of care owed to a vulnerable constituency as well as to other community stakeholders. These agencies have the public trust as well as the ethical caretaking concerns to master. In the following fact scenario and discussion, one would consider a situation where (...) the care of the vulnerable constituency is the paramount concern and the facilitation of that care is also in question. Human Resource and leadership teams need to be cognizant of not only impropriety of members within their organization but also the appearance of impropriety as well. The following case study attempts to put into perspective the need for managers and HR representatives to monitor practice and perception of ethical behavior. (shrink)

In his book The Unfinished Project, Lorenzo Simpson articulates a hermeneutical model for understanding across difference that stresses the importance of analogies. While noting much that is helpful in his account, in this paper I question Simpson’s emphasis on analogical reasoning. After detailing Simpson’s approach, I explore some problems with analogies as a route to understanding. I examine some assumptions behind the idea that one must analogize from what one already understands in order to expand thatunderstanding. In particular I argue (...) that, while in some cases it can be helpful, it is not necessary to use analogies in order to understand another who does not share one’s social position, culture, or worldview, and, perhaps more importantly, it is never sufficient. Moreover, attempting to locate correspondences between oneself and another may in some cases undermine the ability toform the kind of practical relationship that understanding across difference requires. Understanding another is best described, not as requiring analogies between self and other, but rather as requiring a practical relation, a type of relation that I will detail further in the second half of this paper. (shrink)

All this has been clearly revealed by our philosophies of experience, however muddled they may have been about the nature of "experience" itself. Philosophies of experience have taught most when they have tried to place the world stated and known in the context of the world experienced in other ways, in order to learn and state more. They have taught least when, professedly most empirical, and most positivistic, they have tried to stay as close as possible to the world immediately (...) "given." There is a certain irony about the long and never-ending search for the "given," for what we supposedly start with, that is hardly dispelled by the shouts of triumph each time a new "given" is discovered. To seek to know what the world is like when it is not known, is after all intelligible only as a contribution to making the world better known. Whatever else the world may be when it is not known, it is at least not known. (shrink)