Daniel, Michael E Review(s) of: Benedict XVI: A guide for the perplexed, by Tracey Rowland, London: T and T Clark International, 2010, pp.160, $29.95.

This article explores the motives underlying corporate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis begins with Thomas Dunfee’s Statement of Minimum Moral Obligation (SMMO), which specifies, more precisely than any other contribution to the business ethics canon, the level of corporate beneficence required during a pandemic. The analysis then turns to Milton Friedman’s neoliberal understanding of human nature, critically contrasting it with the notion of stoic virtue that informs the works of Adam Smith. Friedman contends that beneficence should play no (...) role in corporate settings. Smith, by contrast, emphasizes the need for prudence, beneficence and self-command in all human endeavours. The article then uses these competing frameworks to reflect on a published survey of 145 corporate responses to COVID-19. In many of these responses, the benefit to a non-financial stakeholder is clear, while the financial consequence to the firm remains nebulous. This supports the contention that during a pandemic, beneficence provides a more complete explanation of many corporate actions than the profit motive alone. The article contests Friedman’s Chicago School profit imperative and goes beyond Dunfee’s SMMO by endorsing the more full-throated embrace of beneficence and stoic virtue found in the works of Smith. (shrink)

Defining moral competence using a virtue approach, this longitudinal study examined the prospective relationships between moral competence and externalizing behavior indexed by delinquency and intention to engage in problem behavior in a large and representative sample of Hong Kong Chinese adolescents. Starting from the 2009–2010 academic year, Grade 7 students in 28 randomly selected secondary schools in Hong Kong were invited to join a longitudinal study, which surveyed participating students annually during the high school years. The current study used data (...) collected in the first three years (Wave 1 to Wave 3) across junior secondary school stage (Grade 7 to Grade 9) with a sample of 3,328 students (Age = 12.59 ±.74 years and 52.1% boys at Wave 1). Cross-lagged panel path analyses were conducted to compare four models involving different hypothesized patterns of relationships between moral competence and externalizing behavior. Results revealed that the reciprocal effects model best fit the data, supporting reciprocal causal relationships between moral competence and externalizing behavior measures. Specifically, a higher level of moral competence significantly predicted a lower level of delinquency and problem behavioral intention over time. At the same time, a higher level of externalizing behavior also significantly predicted a lower level of moral competence one year later. As the magnitudes of the significant findings were not high, replications in different Chinese communities are needed. Nevertheless, the present findings provide important theoretical insights on how moral competence and externalizing behavior in adolescents are associated with each other. Practically speaking, the findings suggest that it is promising to reduce adolescent externalizing behavior by promoting their virtues through moral education programs, and guiding adolescents to behave in a good manner would help promote the development of their virtues. (shrink)

Many experiments have demonstrated that people fail to detect seemingly large visual changes in their environment. Despite these failures, most people confidently predict that they would see changes that are actually almost impossible to see. Therefore, in at least some situations visual experience is demonstrably not what people think it is. This paper describes a line of research suggesting that overconfidence about change detection reflects a deeper metacognitive error founded on beliefs about attention and the role of meaning as a (...) support for a coherent perceptual experience. Accordingly, CBB does not occur in all situations , while the scope of the phenomenon remains broad enough to suggest more than a misunderstanding of a small niche of visual experience. I finish by arguing that despite the very small amount of research on visual metacognition, these beliefs are critical to understand. (shrink)

Although eye tracking has been used extensively to assess cognitions for static stimuli, recent research suggests that the link between gaze and cognition may be more tenuous for dynamic stimuli such as videos. Part of the difficulty in convincingly linking gaze with cognition is that in dynamic stimuli, gaze position is strongly influenced by exogenous cues such as object motion. However, tests of the gaze‐cognition link in dynamic stimuli have been done on only a limited range of stimuli often characterized (...) by highly organized motion. Also, analyses of cognitive contrasts between participants have been mostly been limited to categorical contrasts among small numbers of participants that may have limited the power to observe more subtle influences. We, therefore, tested for cognitive influences on gaze for screen‐captured instructional videos, the contents of which participants were tested on. Between‐participant scanpath similarity predicted between‐participant similarity in responses on test questions, but with imperfect consistency across videos. We also observed that basic gaze parameters and measures of attention to centers of interest only inconsistently predicted learning, and that correlations between gaze and centers of interest defined by other‐participant gaze and cursor movement did not predict learning. It, therefore, appears that the search for eye movement indices of cognition during dynamic naturalistic stimuli may be fruitful, but we also agree that the tyranny of dynamic stimuli is real, and that links between eye movements and cognition are highly dependent on task and stimulus properties. (shrink)

In this chapter, I will consider Miller’s reading of Augustine on the emotions that should arise in a person who, in pursuing justifiable ends, causes morally undesirable eventualities. Drawing on Miller’s article “Augustine, Moral Luck, and the Ethics of Regret and Shame,” I focus on the concept of what he calls “intrapsychic luck” and argue that it offers a new, further humanizing insight into discourses on moral distress in modern medicine. Moral distress, which was first coined in the nursing literature (...) in 1984, has since gained traction in the wider medical literature, with some now hypothesizing it as a root cause of clinician burnout. I will briefly review this development and re-describe moral distress as a feeling of agent-regret that aptly arises in circumstances of what Miller calls “extrapsychic luck.” On this picture, intrapsychic luck clarifies an added source of moral distress that attends to the self’s anarchic desires. I illustrate this point in terms of the pervasive threats of self-interested careerism and commercialism in modern health care and the clinician’s struggle against self-alienation. I show that this struggle further elucidates moral distress as a deeper problem of professional identity and conclude by considering some practical implications of that insight. (shrink)

Law abidance is very important for effective leaders. Without law abidance, abuse of power and corruption would easily happen, which would eventually erode organizational health. To promote law abidance leadership in university students in Hong Kong, we developed a law abidance leadership program with 3 h of face-to-face lecture and 7 h of self-study of materials disturbed to students. To understand students’ perception of the 3-h lecture, we conducted a post-lecture evaluation study using a 26-item measure. Results showed that the (...) scale possessed good reliability and validity. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that the assessment tool has three internally consistent and factorial invariant dimensions: program attributes, appreciation of law abidance, and teacher attributes. Regarding students’ perception of the program, students were generally satisfied with the lecture attributes, including design, content, lecture atmosphere, teaching quality, and benefits to students. In particular, students agreed that the lecture helped them understand the importance and value of law abidance and national security; over 95% of the students indicated that they would try their best to serve as law-abiding citizens and socially responsible leaders. Multiple regression analyses showed that program attributes, appreciation of law abidance, and teacher attributes predicted overall satisfaction with the lecture. Qualitative comments of the student echoed the quantitative findings, with most of the comments being positive in nature. The present study replicated the findings reported previously. Local and international contextual factors relevant to the interpretations of the findings are highlighted. (shrink)

We explore a general method based on trees of elementary submodels in order to present highly simplified proofs to numerous results in infinite combinatorics. While countable elementary submodels have been employed in such settings already, we significantly broaden this framework by developing the corresponding technique for countably closed models of size continuum. The applications range from various theorems on paradoxical decompositions of the plane, to coloring sparse set systems, results on graph chromatic number and constructions from point-set topology. Our main (...) purpose is to demonstrate the ease and wide applicability of this method in a form accessible to anyone with a basic background in set theory and logic. (shrink)

Moral distress names a widely discussed and concerning clinician experience. Yet the precise nature of the distress and the appropriate practical response to it remain unclear. Clinicians speak of their moral distress in terms of guilt, regret, anger, or other distressing emotions, and they often invoke them interchangeably. But these emotions are distinct, and they are not all equally fitting in the same circumstances. This indicates a problematic ambiguity in the moral distress concept that obscures its distinctiveness, its relevant circumstances, (...) and how individual clinicians and the medical community should practically respond to it. We argue that, in a range of situations that are said to be morally distressing, the characteristic emotion can be well‐understood in terms of what Bernard Williams calls “agent‐regret.” We show what can thereby be gained in terms of a less ambiguous concept and a more adequate ethical response to this distinctive and complex clinician experience. (shrink)

Recent research exploring phenomena such as change blindness, inattentional blindness, attentional blink and repetition blindness has revealed a number of counterintuitive ways in which apparently salient visual stimuli often go unnoticed. In fact, large majorities of subjects sometimes predict that they would detect visual changes that actually are rarely noticed, suggesting that people have strong beliefs about visual experience that are demonstrably incorrect. However, for other kinds of visual metacognition, such as picture memory, people underpredict performance. This paper describes two (...) experiments demonstrating that both these overpredictions of change detection, and underpredictions of visual memory can be linked with intuitions about the visual experience of different kinds of agents. Subjects predicted more visual change detection and poorer visual memory for mechanical representational systems when these were anthropomorphized using intentional terminology. (shrink)

The main thesis of this essay is that religious inquiry can and should be central to business ethics instruction in both the business school classroom and the corporate boardroom. Religious conviction has always been a major factor in social progress in America. Hence, removing religious inquiry from ethical instruction severely restricts the potency of such instruction to effect change. The essay first analyzes two aspects of American culture that tend to inhibit religious dialogue: American faith in a wall between the (...) secular and the sacred; and a cultural commitment to 'scientific' inquiries when discussing business matters. Although both cultural beliefs must be taken seriously, however, they need not silence one's religious beliefs and values. Two contemporary frameworks for analyzing issues in business ethics—'stakeholder theory' and 'social contract theory'— are then focused upon and it is demonstrated that religious dialogue and religious principles can usefully supplement either approach. (shrink)

This study examines the manner in which Machiavelli undertakes to elaborate and to justify the notorious "realism" of his political science, which consists in a deliberate and rigorous critique of justice or moral goodness. Despite its overt appeal to the common good and republican devotion, the Discourses on Livy, I argue, supplies a pathway to the foundation of this realism: the work is addressed to "the young" who combine rare intelligence with moral and civic concern, and it is guided by (...) Machiavelli's concern to persuade such readers of the reasonableness of his amoral account of human affairs and the order of the world. Through his discourses on Livy's Romans Machiavelli undertakes to enlighten the young about the meaning of genuine virtu and the distance that allegedly separates it from the justice they currently embrace. ;An examination of Machiavelli's discussions of acquisitive necessity, domestic rule and foreign affairs in Books I and II reveals that the core of this enlightenment is a confrontation with what he understands to be the essentially pious foundation of the moral life: Machiavellian realism is a secular, and secularizing, enterprise. Machiavelli teaches those exceptional youth who are suited to become "princes" that the prosperous management of human affairs requires that the rulers of peoples abandon pious scruple and instead determine appropriate courses of action in accordance with necessities knowable through prudence or natural reason alone. However, by ascending in places to theoretical discussions about the "things of the world" , Machiavelli indicates his awareness that the adequacy of his political critique of piety ultimately depends upon his ability to demonstrate to the full satisfaction of reason the existence and sovereignty of Nature, understood as an order of impersonal necessity. Machiavelli's moral-political realism is thus shown to entail and to point towards a theoretical realism that confronts the claim that the world is ordered providentially under a just and omnipotent sovereign. (shrink)

Spatial attention and eye-movements are tightly coupled, but the precise nature of this coupling is controversial. The influential but controversial Premotor theory of attention makes four specific predictions about the relationship between motor preparation and spatial attention. Firstly, spatial attention and motor preparation use the same neural substrates. Secondly, spatial attention is functionally equivalent to planning goal directed actions such as eye-movements (i.e. planning an action is both necessary and sufficient for a shift of spatial attention). Thirdly, planning a goal (...) directed action with any effector system is sufficient to trigger a shift of spatial attention. Fourthly, the eye-movement system has a privileged role in orienting visual spatial attention. This article reviews empirical studies that have tested these predictions. Contrary to predictions one and two there is evidence of anatomical and functional dissociations between endogenous spatial attention and motor preparation. However, there is compelling evidence that exogenous attention is reliant on activation of the oculomotor system. With respect to the third prediction, there is correlational evidence that spatial attention is directed to the endpoint of goal-directed actions but no direct evidence that this attention shift is dependent on motor preparation. The few studies to have directly tested the fourth prediction have produced conflicting results, so the extent to which the oculomotor system has a privileged role in spatial attention remains unclear. Overall, the evidence is not consistent with the view that spatial attention is functionally equivalent to motor preparation so the Premotor theory should be rejected, although a limited version of the Premotor theory in which only exogenous attention is dependent on motor preparation may still be tenable. A plausible alternative account is that activity in the motor system contributes to biased competition between different sensory representations with the winner of the competition becoming the attended item. (shrink)

Just as sports scholars have long been frustrated by the relative paucity of philosophical writing about sports in the classical tradition, biblical scholars have been surprised by the persistent u...

Moral distress is complex and has received varied definitions, and its distinctiveness is consequently often unclear when placed alongside related concepts like moral injury or moral stress. Buchbi...

This brief article introduces the special section on the ancient philosophy of sport. The article introduces the various papers, explains the background of the project and thanks the appropriate pa...

Is there such a sub-discipline as “sociology of valuation and evaluation”? Identifying the main focus, the topics, and the analytical designs, i.e., reflecting on a theoretical profile of such an investigation, is far from complete. The main question is indeed—where to start when addressing the sociology of valuation and evaluation? Is it a specific area of research, analysis, and inquiry, with specific objects? Should we confine it to the many important qualitative and quantitative studies dedicated to the measure of market (...) performance, the efficiency of public policy, profitability of private investment, or identification of best practices in various areas ? Beyond business and administration processes, a huge body of research in economic sociology has developed in recent years that has renewed the investigations on economic experience through a moral lens (Lamont 2000; Vatin 2008; Karpik 2010; Beckert and Aspe .. (shrink)

ARISTOTLE thought his predecessors in general, and Plato in particular, made a serious mistake in failing to mark the boundaries separating the different sciences and branches of philosophical inquiry. All of them failed to grasp the fundamental distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge. Ethics and politics, the prime examples of practical knowledge, differ from such theoretical sciences as metaphysics and physics not only in their aims but in their methods and subject matter as well. Indeed, Aristotle thinks the differences are (...) such that we cannot regard practical and theoretical knowledge as two species of a single genus, for there is no common definition of knowledge which applies to both. (shrink)