Background: Clinical ethics committees have been broadly implemented in university hospitals, general hospitals and nursing homes. To ensure the quality of ethics consultations, evaluation should be mandatory. Research question/aim: The aim of this article is to evaluate the perspectives of all people involved and the process of implementation on the wards. Research design and participants: The data were collected in two steps: by means of non-participating observation of four ethics case consultations and by open-guided interviews with 28 participants. Data analysis (...) was performed according to grounded theory. Ethical considerations: The study received approval from the local Ethics Commission (registration no.: 32/11/10). Findings: ‘Communication problems’ and ‘hierarchical team conflicts’ proved to be the main aspects that led to ethics consultation, involving two factors: unresolvable differences arise in the context of team conflicts on the ward and unresolvable differences prevent a solution being found. Hierarchical asymmetries, which are common in the medical field, support this vicious circle. Based on this, minor or major disagreements regarding clinical decisions might be seen as ethical conflicts. The expectation on the clinical ethics committee is to solve this (communication) problem, but the participants experienced that hierarchy is maintained by the clinical ethics committee members. Discussion: The asymmetrical structures of the clinical ethics committee reflect the institutional hierarchical nature. They endure, despite the fact that the clinical ethics committee should be able to detect and overcome them. Disagreements among care givers are described as one of the most difficult ethically relevant situations and should be recognised by the clinical ethics committee. On the contrary, discussion of team conflicts and clinical ethical issues should not be combined, since the first is a mandate for team supervision. Conclusion: To avoid dominance by physicians and an excessively factual character of the presentation, the case or conflict could be presented by both physicians and nurses, a strategy that strengthens the interpersonal and emotional aspects and also integrates both professional perspectives. (shrink)

In this article, we propose a pluralistic approach to the explanation of social understanding that integrates literature from social psychology with the theory of mind debate. Social understanding in everyday life is achieved in various ways. As a rule of thumb we propose that individuals make use of whatever procedure is cognitively least demanding to them in a given context. Aside from theory and simulation, associations of behaviors with familiar agents play a crucial role in social understanding. This role has (...) been neglected so far. We illustrate the roles of fluency and associations in social understanding in false belief tasks. (shrink)

: We discuss the role that transnational corporations should play in developing global governance, creating a framework of rules and regulations for the global economy. The central issue is whether TNCs should provide global rules and guarantee individual citizenship rights, or instead focus on maximizing profits. First, we describe the problems arising from the globalization process that affect the relationship between public rules and private firms. Next we consider the position of economic and management theories in relation to the social (...) responsibility of the firm. We argue that instrumental stakeholder theory and business and society research can only partially solve the global governance issue, and that more recent concepts of corporate citizenship and republican business ethics deliver theoretically and practically helpful, fresh insights. However, even these need further development, especially with regard to the legitimacy of corporate political activity. (shrink)

The social interface between reproductive medicine and embryonic stem cell research has been investigated in a pilot study at a large IVF clinic in central China. Methods included observation, interviews with hospital personnel, and five in-depth qualitative interviews with women who underwent IVF and who were asked for their consent to the donation of embryos for use in medical (in fact human embryonic stem cell) research. This paper reports, and discusses from an ethical perspective, the results of an analysis of (...) these interviews. The participants talked of extreme social pressure to become pregnant. Once they had a baby, ‘spare’ embryos lost practical significance due to the Chinese one-child policy. In the context of decision making about donating embryos to research, the women used the clinical distinctions between ‘good and bad quality’ embryos and also between frozen and transferred embryos, as guiding moral distinctions. In the absence of concrete information about what sort of research their embryos should be used for, the women interviewed either refused consent (for fear that the embryo would be given to another couple) or accepted, expressing motives of solidarity with other women in a similar situation. This reveals that they filled the knowledge gap with an image of research improving fertility treatment. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the role of intention and joint attention in joint actions. Depending on the shared intentions the agents have, we distinguish between joint path-goal actions and joint final-goal actions. We propose an instrumental account of basic joint action analogous to a concept of basic action and argue that intentional joint attention is a basic joint action. Furthermore, we discuss the functional role of intentional joint attention for successful cooperation in complex joint actions. Anika Fiebich is (...) PhD student in Philosophy at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Shaun Gallagher is Lilian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, USA. (shrink)

In this paper I examine whether different suggestions made in the philosophy of perception can help us to explain and understand the phenomenal character of emotional experience. After having introduced the range of possible positions, I consider qualia-theory, reductive pure intentionalism and reductive impure intentionalism. I argue that qualia-theory can easily explain why emotions are phenomenal states at all but that it cannot account for the “inextricable link thesis” which is quite prominent in the philosophy of emotion. Reductive pure and (...) impure intentionalism, in turn, seem to fit better with this thesis but they have difficulties to explain what makes emotions phenomenal states at all. Therefore, I finally discuss whether non-reductive intentionalism might be an option for explaining the phenomenal character of emotional experience. (shrink)

Unfortunately there is a typo in section 2.3.1, paragraph 7 “Referring to recent findings from verbal versions of the true belief task that suggest that 4- to 5-year-old children pass such tasks not via belief reasoning but simpler heuristics that draw on perceptual access, Fiebich argues that 4- to 5-year-olds are still engaged in cognitively demanding belief reasoning when passing verbal versions of the false belief task.”.

In many immigrant groups, women gain less command of the host country language than the men. Using life story interviews with marriage migrants from Turkey, now living in Denmark, this article investigates this limited language learning, linking it to these women's lives as they primarily unfold in three social locations: households, workplaces and language schools. During their first years in Denmark a gendered division of work may relegate the women to the Turkish- or Kurdish-speaking home environment. When they subsequently enter (...) work, their poor Danish skills only allow them access into jobs with little host country interaction. The available language education becomes fragmented after childbirth and often remains inadequate to substantially raise the women's command of Danish. Furthermore, national legislation may unintentionally impede language learning. As a result, even women with expressed ambitions of acquiring Danish may continue living below a `language threshold' that precludes them from gaining broader access to host country resources. (shrink)

Emotion is conceptualised as an emergent, dynamic process based on an individual's subjective appraisal of significant events. It is argued that theoretical models of emotion need to propose an architecture that reflects the essential nature and functions of emotion as a psychobiological and cultural adaptation mechanism. One proposal for such a model and its underlying dynamic architecture, the component process model, is briefly sketched and compared with some of its major competitors. Recent empirical evidence in support of the model is (...) reviewed. Special emphasis is given to the dynamic aspect of emotion processes, in particular the sequence of appraisal checks and the synchronisation of response systems, as well as the capacity of the model to predict individual differences in emotional responding. (shrink)

As legal scholar Ariela Dubler notes, the institution of marriage casts a long shadow across contemporary social life. Much more than a way of conferring social sanction on sexual and romantic relationships, marriage unlocks a wide range of social goods, from inheritance rights to medical records access. In addition, though, and as generations of feminists, queer activists, and others have made clear, this institution is part of a wider network of power relationships that it helps to shore up and conceal. (...) Critics most often point to the way the marital regime quietly reinforces patriarchal, bourgeois liberal, and heteronormative assumptions, hiding them in the shadow of putatively benign, private, and natural social structures. This article brings the overlooked connections between marriage and race out of the shadows and more fully into view. Using and refining a fourfold notion of racial invisibility developed in Taylor’s Black Is Beautiful, we consider two respects in which this ocularcentric metaphor for racialized epistemic short-circuiting is particularly appropriate for discussing the marital regime. (shrink)

For decades, philosophers and psychologists have assumed that children understand other people’s behavior on the basis of Belief Reasoning (BR) at latest by age 5 when they pass the false belief task. Furthermore, children’s use of BR in the true belief task has been regarded as being ontogenetically prior. Recent findings from developmental studies challenge this view and indicate that 4- to 5-year-old children make use of a reasoning strategy, which is cognitively less demanding than BR and called perceptual access (...) reasoning (PAR), in true belief tasks. I appeal to research on fluency to explain these findings. On my account, 4- to 5- year-old children understand other people’s behavior by means of BR if they experience cognitive strain (such as in false belief tasks) but they revert to simpler heuristics PAR when such an experience is missing (such as in true belief tasks). (shrink)

In this article I defend pluralist theory against various objections. First, I argue that although traditional theories may also account for multiple ways to achieve social understanding, they still put some emphasis on one particular epistemic strategy. Pluralist theory, in contrast, rejects the so-called ‘default assumption’ that there is any primary or default method in social understanding. Second, I illustrate that pluralist theory needs to be distinguished from integration theory. On one hand, integration theory faces the difficulty of trying to (...) combine traditional theories of social understanding that have contradictory background assumptions. On the other hand, pluralist theory goes beyond integrating traditional theories by accounting for a variety of factors that may play a role in social understanding but have been neglected in such theories, including stereotype activation, social and personal relationships, contextual features, individual moods, perceptions, and so on. Third, I argue that if the default assumption is rejected, pluralist theorists need to provide another positive account of why particular cognitive processes are more likely to come into play in a specific instance of social understanding than others in order to provide a genuine alternative to traditional theories. I discuss three versions of pluralist theory that meet this challenge by pointing to normativity, fluency, and interaction. (shrink)

In this book, which was originally published in 1992, Klaus Scherer brought together leading scholars from the social sciences to discuss theoretical and empirical studies of justice. They examined the nature of justice from the perspective of philosophy, economics, law, sociology and psychology, and explored possible lines of convergence. A critical examination of theories of justice from Plato and Aristotle, through Marx, to Rawls and Habermas heads a collection which addresses the role of justice in economics and the law (...) and which evaluates sociological and psychological stances in relation to justice distributive and procedural. All the material is of clear cross-disciplinary interest; and this broad and authoritative survey of thinking on the topic will appeal to all researchers in the area, whatever their background, as well as to those confronting issues of justice in law politics and business. (shrink)

In this article, I argue for cooperation as a three-dimensional phenomenon lying on the continua of a cognitive, a behavioural, and an affective axis. Traditional accounts of joint action argue for cooperation as involving a shared intention. Developmental research has shown that such cooperation requires rather sophisticated social cognitive skills such as having a robust theory of mind - that is acquired not until age 4 to 5 in human ontogeny. However, also younger children are able to cooperate in various (...) ways. Moreover, the coordinated behaviours of the agents can be more or less complex. Finally, phenomenological considerations and findings from social psychology illustrate that affective states and agent-specificities may play a central role in cooperative activities. I end with discussing the implications of my analysis that speak in favour of a pluralist account of social cognition. (shrink)

This article assesses some of the implications of globalization for the scholarly debate on business ethics, CSR and related concepts. The argument is based, among other things, on the declining capacity of nation state institutions to regulate socially desirable corporate behavior as well as the growing corporate exposure to heterogeneous social, cultural and political values in societies globally. It is argued that these changes are shifting the corporate role towards a sphere of societal governance hitherto dominated by traditional political actors. (...) This leads to a discussion of the ambivalent results of such a process for a responsible corporate role in a globalized world. While assessing the current reception these changes have received in the management literature, the contributions of the four articles in this Special Issue are framed and evaluated. The argument closes by highlighting avenues of future research on this new challenge. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to determine to what extent contemporary cross-cultural and developmental research can shed light on the role that narrative practices might play in the development of folk psychology. In particular, I focus on the role of narrative practices in the development of false belief understanding, which has been regarded as a milestone in the development of folk psychology. Second, I aim to discuss possible cognitive procedures that may underlie successful performance in false belief tasks. Methodologically, I (...) distinguish between two kinds of narrative practices: ‘mentalistic narrative practice’, and ‘behavioral-contextual narrative practice’ behavior of another person in a specific socio-situational context). Whereas the former is more prevalent in Western cultures than in Eastern cultures, the latter is predominantly used by members of Eastern cultures. Mentalistic narrative practices correlate with cultural divergences in the development of false belief understanding throughout ontogeny but do not seem to play the key role. The analysis shows that conceptual change and the acquisition of mental state terms is essential for passing the false belief task, and that theory is likely to be the cognitive mechanism involved here such as proposed by Theory Theory. However, Hutto’s Narrative Practice Hypothesis trumps over Theory Theory to account for the varieties and ambiguities people typically meet when understanding each other in everyday life. (shrink)

Appraisal theories of emotion, and particularly the Component Process Model, claim that the different components of the emotion process (action tendencies, physiological reactions, expressions, and feeling experiences) are essentially driven by the results of cognitive appraisals and that the feeling component constitutes a central integration and representation of these processes. Given the complexity of the proposed architecture, comprehensive experimental tests of these predictions are difficult to perform and to date are lacking. Encouraged by the “lexical sedimentation” hypothesis, here we propose (...) an indirect examination of the compatibility of the theoretical assumptions with the semantic structure of a set of major emotion words as measured in a cross-language and cross-cultural study. Specifically, we performed a secondary analysis of the large-scale data set with ratings of affective features covering all components of the emotion process for 24 emotion words in 27 countries, constituting profiles of emotion-specific appraisals, action tendencies, physiological reactions, expressions, and feeling experiences. The results of a series of hierarchical regression analyses to examine the prediction of the theoretical model are highly consistent with the claim that appraisal patterns determine the structure of the response components, which in turn predict central dimensions of the feeling component. (shrink)

This paper critically considers the responsibility of transnational enterprises in the process of globalization. The traditional state-centric approach with its separation of politics and business is not capable of explaining business behaviour in a globalized world. We review the theory of economic ethics by Karl Hornrom and emphasize the theoretical challenges that need tobe addressed by business ethics. In particular, business ethics has to integrate the political role that transnational enterprises are playing in global govemance processes.

This volume examines minimality in cooperation and shared agency from various angles. It features essays written by top scholars in the philosophy of mind and action. Taken together, the essays provide a genuine contribution to the contemporary joint action debate. The main accounts in this debate present sufficient rather than necessary or minimal criteria for there to be cooperation. Much discussion in the debate deals with robust rather than more attenuate and simple cases of cooperation or shared agency. Focusing on (...) such minimal cases, however, may help to explain how cooperation comes into existence and how minimal cooperation interrelates with more complex cases of cooperation. The contributors discuss minimality in cooperation by focusing on particular aspects. For example, they consider how social roles might deliver minimal cooperation constraints or what the minimal contextual criteria are for cooperation to emerge. Readers will find the answers to these and other questions: What is minimally cooperative behavior? By what steps could full members of a society organized by conventions, norms and institutions be constructed from creatures with minimal social skills and cognitive abilities? What do we experience of actions when we act together with a purpose? (shrink)

Commenting La logique sociale of Gabriel Tarde, René Schérer demonstrates the striking lines of a thought completely devoted to the idea of invention : in ersubju7ive vision of the social, distinction between creation and reproduction and between invention and a rehearsal which characterizes as much work as capital, power and enjoyment of an invention made by peculiar associations, opening in, and on others and multiplicities, aversion of any binding system. He drows-up a parallel between this not-academic thinker aril Charles Fourier’s (...) system, to open on the social conceived as a planetary brain. (shrink)

Although company narratives frequently emphasize impressive sales numbers and market leadership, such an organizational “top dog” narrative can backfire when companies are accused of engaging in unethical conduct. This research demonstrates, through a series of nine (N = 3872) experimental studies, that an organizational top dog (vs. underdog) narrative increases the intended punishment of company moral transgressions but not non-moral transgressions. Such differences in intended punishment emerge because observers infer that organizations with a top dog narrative use predominantly dominance-based strategies (...) to achieve their status, whereas companies with an underdog narrative are less likely perceived as employing such strategies. We provide preliminary evidence that a debiasing intervention decreases the harsher punishment of organizations with a top dog narrative but does not affect the punishment of organizations with an underdog narrative. (shrink)

La hospitalidad no es una virtud moral; ella es un componente de la hominización del hombre; una parte integrante del “devenir-hombre”. Más que una responsabilidad y una solidaridad, la hospitalidad es una apertura hacia la comunidad compartida del devenir otro. Esos diferentes conceptos son problematizados en este artículo para llegar a una perspectiva nueva de ese problema filosófico.

The Two Truths in Chinese Buddhism, Chang-Qing Shih, pp. xviii, 401. Rs. 695. ISBN 81-208-2035-5.

This book provides an insightful analysis of the moral and ethical values that underpin Japanese culture and society. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on (...) the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Modern society is challenged by a loss of efficiency in national governance systems values, and lifestyles. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) discourse builds upon a conception of organizational legitimacy that does not appropriately reflect these changes. The problems arise from the a-political role of the corporation in the concepts of cognitive and pragmatic legitimacy, which are based on compliance to national law and on relatively homogeneous and stable societal expectations on the one hand and widely accepted rhetoric assuming that all members (...) of society benefit from capitalist production on the other. We therefore propose a fundamental shift to moral legitimacy, from an output and power oriented approach to an input related and discursive concept of legitimacy. This shift creates a new basis of legitimacy and involves organizations in processes of active justification vis-à-vis society rather than simply responding to the demands of powerful groups. We consider this a step towards the politicization of the corporation and attempt to re-embed the debate on corporate legitimacy into its broader context of political theory, while reflecting the recent turn from a liberal to a deliberative concept of democracy. (shrink)

'Affective computing' is a branch of computing concerned with the theory and construction of machines which can detect, respond to, and simulate human emotional states. This book presents an interdisciplinary exploration of this rapidly expanding field, aimed at those in psychology, computational neuroscience, computer science, and AI. A Blueprint for Affective Computing: A sourcebook and manual is the very first attempt to ground affective computing within the disciplines of psychology, affective neuroscience, and philosophy. This book illustrates the contributions of each (...) of these disciplines to the development of the ever-growing field of affective computing. In addition, it demonstrates practical examples of cross-fertilization between disciplines in order to highlight the need for integration of computer science, engineering and the affective sciences. (shrink)

Appraisal theory has become one of the most active aproaches in the domain of emotion psychology. The appraisal process consists of the subjective evaluation that occurs during the individual's encounter with significant events in the environment, determining the nature of the emotional reaction and experience. The organism's interpretation of events and situations elicits and differentiates its emotional responses, although the exact processes involved and the limits of the theory are still a matter of debate and are currently the object of (...) active research. This volume is intended to become the primary source of information on appraisal for all those interested in emotion, from beginning graduate students to accomplished researchers in emotion psychology. (shrink)

This essay deals with a particularly recalcitrant problem in the history of ideas, that of irrationalism. It emerged to full consciousness in mid-eighteenth century thought. Irrationalism was a logical consequence of individualism which in turn was a direct outcome of the Cartesian self-reflective subject. In time these tendencies produced the "critical" Zeitgeist and the "epoch of taste" during which Kant began thinking about such matters. Like Alfred Bäumler, I argue that irrationalism could not have arisen in ancient or medieval philosophical (...) discourse, as they both lacked a certain type of rationalism required as its conceptual antipode. Only after the Lisbon earthquake (1755), and the ensuing reason vs. passion debate acknowledging for the first time both human powers as equal contenders, did the specter of irrationalism arise and become a focus. Kant's revolution in thought produced "transcendental psychology" reconciling "pure" sensibility and "pure" reason and provided, I argue, the conceptual wherewithal to grant aesthetic feeling and irrationalism a philosophical niche. (shrink)