Walter Savage Landor's exasperated marginal comment on line 13 of Horace, C. 1. 4 has sent modern commentators scurrying to the poem's defence. The skirmish has been won for Horace, but at the expense perhaps of magnifying the importance of line 13: A. Y. Campbell insisted that pallida mors, far from being irrelevant, was ‘the focus of the whole poem’.

Although theory refers to organizational culture as an important variable in corrupt organizations, only little empirical research has addressed the characteristics of a corrupt organizational culture. Besides some characteristics that go hand in hand with unethical behavior and other features of corrupt organizations, we are still not able to describe a corrupt organizational culture in terms of its underlying assumptions, values, and norms. With a qualitative approach, we studied similarities of organizational culture across different corrupt organizations. In this study, we (...) performed content analysis on interviews of 14 independent experts about their experience with corrupt organizations. With this approach, we gained insights about different corrupt organizations spanning different branches (e.g., government, foreign trade, pharmacy, sports, building industry). We found that corrupt organizations perceive themselves to fight in a war, which leads to their taken-for-granted assumption that “the end justifies the means”. This assumption inspires many values and norms of the organizational culture. An important value in a corrupt organization is “security”, and an important norm is punishment of deviant (i.e., non-corrupt) behavior. Furthermore, managers and employees differ in their perception of organizational culture. While the management endorses values, such as success, results, and performance, and implements these values in their norms of goal setting, employees make use of rationalization strategies and endorse values of security and team spirit. (shrink)

Democratic countries, such as Australia, face the dilemma of preserving public and national security without sacrificing fundamental freedoms. In the context where the rule of law is an underlying assumption of the constitutional framework, Emergency Powers in Australia provides a succinct analysis of the sorts of emergency which have been experienced in Australia and an evaluation of the legal weapons available to the authorities to cope with these emergencies. It analyses the scope of the defence power to determine the constitutionality (...) of federal legislation to deal with wartime crises and the 'war' on terrorism, the extent of the executive power and its relationship to the prerogative, the deployment of the defence forces in aid of the civil power, the statutory frameworks regulating the responses to civil unrest, and natural disasters. The role of the courts when faced with challenges to the invocation of emergency powers is explained and analysed. (shrink)

Moral psychology studies the features of cognition, judgement, perception and emotion that make human beings capable of moral action. Perspectives from feminist and race theory immensely enrich moral psychology. Writers who take these perspectives ask questions about mind, feeling, and action in contexts of social difference and unequal power and opportunity. These essays by a distinguished international cast of philosophers explore moral psychology as it connects to social life, scientific studies, and literature.

The second edition of H. P. Lee's The Australian Judiciary provides a timely update to this seminal text. The only definitive survey of the entire Australian judiciary, this text describes and evaluates the work, techniques, problems and the future of the different tiers of courts and judges. It discusses the role of the judiciary as the third sector of government and analyses and comments on judicial conduct, judicial independence and impartiality, the work of judges beyond the courts, the accountability of (...) judges and the dangers to judicial institutions. It is an excellent reference work which will appeal to legal scholars and practitioners throughout Australia and internationally. (shrink)

This article explores the accounts of Canadian-trained health professionals working in humanitarian and development organizations who considered not treating a patient or group of patients because of resource limitations. In the narratives, not treating the patient(s) was sometimes understood as the right thing to do, and sometimes as wrong. In analyzing participants’ narratives we draw attention to how medications and equipment are represented. In one type of narrative, medications and equipment are represented primarily as scarce resources; in another, they are (...) represented as patient care. In the contexts respondents were working, medications and equipment were often both patient care interventions and scarce resources. The analytic point is that health professionals tend to emphasize one conceptualization over the other in coming to assert that not treating is right, or wrong. Rendering tacit ethical frameworks more explicit makes them available for reflection and debate. (shrink)

The aim of this book is “to point how far the Arabian philosophers succeeded in their attempt to integrate the Semitic and Muslim conception of revelation with Greek wisdom.” The problem is precisely that which confronted the Catholic theologians of the 13th century. Seeing the efforts of the Arabian philosophers side by side with the achievement of St. Thomas we can better appreciate what St. Thomas succeeded in doing.

Our team at the Centre for Clinical Ethics has long been engaged in internal discussion about the purpose and value of ethics debriefs and their purported role in reducing moral distress (Morley an...

Guided by principles of life history strategy development, this study tested the hypothesis that sexual precocity and violence are influenced by sensitivities to local environmental conditions. Two models of strategy development were compared: The first is based on indirect perception of ecological cues through family disruption and the second is based on both direct and indirect perception of ecological stressors. Results showed a moderate correlation between rates of violence and sexual precocity (r = 0.59). Although a model incorporating direct and (...) indirect effects provided a better fit than one based on family mediation alone, significant improvements were made by linking some ecological factors directly to behavior independently of strategy development. The models support the contention that violence and teenage pregnancy are part of an ecologically determined pattern of strategy development and suggest that while the family unit is critical in affecting behavior, individuals’ direct experiences of the environment are also important. (shrink)

This essay draws on the formative stories of suffering in the Latter-day Saint faith community to affirm that suffering is an invitation to discern the revelation of sacred presence. The meaningfulness of suffering presupposes a narrative context that permits the quest for God to be accompanied by the questioning of God. The narrative ordeal of suffering transforms passion into compassion and outrage into an experience for good. In the midst of suffering, Latter-day Saints are thus called to an ethic of (...) emulation. (shrink)

The problem of suffering is essentially a problem in philosophical theology. For many philosophical systems the phenomena of suffering set no special problem at all. The most influential philosophies of the present age, for example, have almost nothing to say on the subject—and there is no reason why, on their metaphysical; principles, they should say anything. The problem is a relevant one only for those philosophies which claim to be in at least general accord with the “religious interpretation of the (...) universe.” But for them it is crucial. Given a Weltanschauung like that of Absolute Idealism, for which the ultimate principle from which all things derive their being is an Infinite and Perfect Spirit, and it becomes at once a clear obligation to offer some explanation of how we are to reconcile the Goodness of God with the existence in the world of so much suffering which is prima facie just bad. As we all know, the problem is an extraordinarily hard one to solve. But, inasmuch as the religious interpretation of the universe demands its solution as a condition of its own possibility, its importance is proportionate to its difficulty. (shrink)

I have chosen my topic for this evening with an eye to something rather more than its intrinsic philosophical interest. Modern man, as we are all painfully aware, is facing a crisis of peculiar gravity. Perhaps the odds are not so very heavy against a third world war followed by world collapse into anarchy and barbarism. At such a time the philosopher is bound to ask himself whether there is no contribution which his science can make towards the succour of (...) civilization. (shrink)

Social stimuli grab our attention: we attend to them in an automatic and bottom-up manner, and ascribe them a higher degree of saliency compared to non-social stimuli. However, it has rarely been investigated how variations in attention affect the processing of social stimuli, although the answer could help us uncover details of social cognition processes such as action understanding. In the present study, we examined how changes to bottom-up attention affects neural EEG-responses associated with intentional action processing. We induced an (...) increase in bottom-up attention by using hypnosis. We recorded the electroencephalographic µ-wave suppression of hypnotized participants when presented with intentional actions in first and third person perspective in a video-clip paradigm. Previous studies have shown that the µ-rhythm is selectively suppressed both when executing and observing goal-directed motor actions; hence it can be used as a neural signal for intentional action processing. Our results show that neutral hypnotic trance increases µ-suppression in highly suggestible participants when they observe intentional actions. This suggests that social action processing is enhanced when bottom-up attentional processes are predominant. Our findings support the Social Relevance Hypothesis, according to which social action processing is a bottom-up driven attentional process, and can thus be altered as a function of bottom-up processing devoted to a social stimulus. (shrink)

Through corporate social responsibility activities, a firm can develop the capability for managing and benefiting from stakeholder relationships. This study refers to such a capability as stakeholder influence capacity. In a host country, locally sourcing parts and/or materials can generate economic value and improve social welfare. Moreover, local sourcing provides opportunities for a foreign firm to apply and advance SIC while closely interacting with host-country stakeholders. Accordingly, we expect that a firm, having gained SIC through CSR activities in its home (...) country, will be more likely to source parts and/or materials in the host country. We also expect that the relationship between SIC and host-country sourcing is conditional upon a foreign firm’s intangible resources and liabilities of foreignness. Our empirical analysis, using Korean datasets, supports the positive relationship between CSR and local sourcing. We find that this positive relationship is more pronounced either when the firm is committed to technology development or when its home and host countries are geographically or culturally distant. (shrink)

I present first what I take to be a more interesting item than the others. O.C 716–19. δ' ερετμος κπαγλ' λα χερ σ ✝παραπτομναπλτα θρσκει, τν κατομπδων νηρῄδων κλουθος. The above is Pearson's text, except that I have transferred the last syllable of his 716 to the beginning of my 717. Careful consideration of the metre of this stasimon has convinced me that 716 is rightly regarded by Schroeder as an ionic trimeter ; further, that 717 is what most people (...) call a glyconic, as is also 718. Naturally therefore I follow Hermann and Jebb as regards the text in 704, and have thus no use for the three conjectures mentioned by Pearson as substitutes for our admittedly corrupt παραπτομνα. (shrink)

:Recent neuroimaging research on disorders of consciousness provides direct evidence of covert consciousness otherwise not detected clinically in a subset of severely brain-injured patients. These findings have motivated strategic development of binary communication paradigms, from which researchers interpret voluntary modulations in brain activity to glean information about patients’ residual cognitive functions and emotions. The discovery of such responsiveness raises ethical and legal issues concerning the exercise of autonomy and capacity for decisionmaking on matters such as healthcare, involvement in research, and (...) end of life. These advances have generated demands for access to the technology against a complex background of continued scientific advancement, questions about just allocation of healthcare resources, and unresolved legal issues. Interviews with professionals whose work is relevant to patients with disorders of consciousness reveal priorities concerning further basic research, legal and policy issues, and clinical considerations. (shrink)

In mid-2018, following a survey of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender groups, the UK government issued a consultation on the proposed reform of the Gender Recognition Act for England and Wales.1 When it was first introduced in 2004, the GRA was considered innovative, even world-leading legislation.2 The act enables any adult to seek to change their legal gender provided several criteria are met. These include: If the applicant is successful, he or she is issued with a ‘gender recognition certificate’, their (...) birth certificate is changed and ‘for all purposes’ they become, legally, their acquired or affirmed gender. Since 2004, cultural change in relation to gender identity has been rapid. During the government’s preliminary survey, several concerns were raised about the GRA, particularly among those who have changed, or who may be seeking to change, their gender. These included: The government has stated that being trans is not a mental illness—more a fact of human diversity. It points to the World Health Organisation’s revision of the International Classification of Diseases, in which ‘gender incongruence’, another term for gender dysphoria, is no longer classed under ‘mental and behavioural disorders’.3 ### Draft proposals for change The government considers the reform of the GRA …. (shrink)

Has biopolitics actually become thanatopolitics, a field of study obsessed with death? Is there something about the nature of biopolitical thought today that makes it impossibile to deploy affirmatively? If this is true, what can life-minded thinkers put forward as the merits of biopolitical reflection? These questions drive Improper Life.Campbell argues that a "crypto-thanatopolitics" can be teased out of Heidegger's critique of technology and that some of the leading scholars of biopolitics---including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Peter Sloterdijk---have been (...) substansively influenced by Heidegger's thought, particularly his reading of proper and improper writing. In fact, Campbell shows how all of these philosophers have pointed toward a tragic, thanatopolitical destination as somehow an inevitable result of technology. But in Improper Life he articulates a corrective biopolitics that can begin with rereadings of Foucault, Freud, and Gilles Deleuze. Throughout Improper Life, Campbell insists that biopolitics can become more positive and productively asserts an affirmation techne not thought through thanatos but rather through bios. (shrink)