This book celebrates the work of Patricia Werhane, an iconic figure in business ethics. This festschrift is a collection of articles that build on Werhane’s contributions to business ethics in such areas as Employee Rights, the Legacy of Adam Smith, Moral Imagination, Women in Business, the development of the field of business ethics, and her contributions to such fields as Health Care, Education, Teaching, and Philosophy. All papers are new contributions to the management literature written by well-known business ethicists, such (...) as Norman Bowie, Richard De George, Ronald Duska, Edwin Hartman, Michael Hoffman, Mollie Painter-Morland, Mark Schwartz, Andrew Wicks, and others. The volume is comprised of articles that reflect on Werhane’s work as well as build on it as a way to advance further research. At the end of the festschrift, Pat Werhane provides responses to each chapter. The first chapter of the book also includes the overview of Patricia Werhane’s work and her academic career. The book is written to appeal to management scholars and graduate students interested in the areas of Business Ethics, Modern Capitalism, and Human Rights. Patricia Werhane is one of the most distinguished figures in the field of business ethics. She was a founder of the field, she is one of its leading scholars, and she has had a profound impact on the world of business practice. Among her many accomplishments, Pat is known for her original work on moral imagination, she is an acclaimed authority on employee rights in the workplace, and she is one of the leading scholars on Adam Smith. Having been active in Academia for over 50 years, Werhane is a prolific author of over a hundred articles and book chapters, and the author or editor of twenty-seven books, including Adam Smith and his Legacy for Modern Capitalism, Moral Imagination and Management Decision-Making, and co-authored books Organization Ethics in Health Care, Alleviating Poverty Through Profitable Partnerships, Obstacles to Ethical Decision-Making, Corporate Responsibility: The American Experience, and Research Approaches to Business Ethics and Corporate Responsibility. (shrink)

The organism is one of the fundamental concepts of biology and has been at the center of many discussions about biological individuality, yet what exactly it is can be confusing. The definition that we find generally useful is that an organism is a unit in which all the subunits have evolved to be highly cooperative, with very little conflict. We focus on how often organisms evolve from two or more formerly independent organisms. Two canonical transitions of this type—replicators clustered in (...) cells and endosymbiotic organelles within host cells—demonstrate the reality of this kind of evolutionary transition and suggest conditions that can favor it. These conditions include co-transmission of the partners across generations and rules that strongly regulate and limit conflict, such as a fair meiosis. Recently, much attention has been given to associations of animals with microbes involved in their nutrition. These range from tight endosymbiotic associations like those between aphids and Buchnera bacteria, to the complex communities in animal intestines. Here, starting with a reflection about identity through time, we consider the distinctions between these kinds of animal–bacteria interactions and describe the criteria by which a few can be considered jointly organismal but most cannot. (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)

William James is frequently considered one of America's most important philosophers, as well as a foundational thinker for the study of religion. Despite his reputation as the founder of pragmatism, he is rarely considered a serious philosopher or religious thinker. In this new interpretation David Lamberth argues that James's major contribution was to develop a systematic metaphysics of experience integrally related to his developing pluralistic and social religious ideas. Lamberth systematically interprets James's radically empiricist world-view and argues for an (...) early dating for his commitment to the metaphysics of radical empiricism. He offers a close reading of Varieties of Religious Experience; and concludes by connecting James's ideas about experience, pluralism and truth to current debates in philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and theology, suggesting James's functional, experiential metaphysics as a conceptual aid in bridging the social and interpretive with the immediate and concrete while avoiding naive realism. (shrink)

There are several branches of ethics. Clinical ethics, the one closest to medical decisionmaking, can be seen as a branch of medicine itself. In this view, clinical ethics is a unitary hermeneutics. Its rule is a guideline for unifying other theories of ethics in conjunction with the clinical context. Put another way, clinical ethics interprets the clinical situation in light of a balance of other values that, while guiding the decisionmaking process, also contributes to the very weighting of those values. (...) The case itself originates ideas, not only about which value ought to predominate in its resolution, but also provides the origin of clinical rules that can be used in other cases. These are interpretive rules. Some examples of these rules are presented as well. (shrink)

Objective Ethical standards state research participation must be voluntary and free of coercion and undue influence, but what if a third party appears to engage in research-relevant coercion, without the researchers’ knowledge? This case study describes this type of situation and its resolution. Methods We are engaged in a randomized clinical trial evaluating pedestrian safety with 7- and 8- years old. Depending on children's rate of learning, families receive up to $1275 for their time. We recently learned a third-party “talent (...) agency,” a firm placing children in modeling and acting jobs, was referring families to our research with the expectation that families would share 20% of study reimbursements. Results We sensed clear impropriety, but identified no ethical violations on our part as researchers. Once paid a study reimbursement, participants can spend funds how they wish. We were concerned, however, that the third-party was exploitatively coercing families to participate. Conclusions We pursued four avenues to resolve the issue. First, we documented the situation to our university Institutional Review Board. Second, we contacted the talent agency and requested they stop referring families to our research. They agreed. Third, we retained children engaged in our study who were referred from the talent agency; removing them partway through the clinical trial could impact study results. In doing so, we explained that we were unaware of the talent agency referral and that they were not obligated by us to offer a portion of the study reimbursement to the talent agency. Last, we asked newly enrolled families about their referral source. (shrink)

Considerable debate has occurred about the proper role of philosophers when offering ethics consultations. Some argue that only physicians or clinical experienced personnel should offer ethics consultations in the clinical setting. Others argue still further that philosophers are ill-equipped to offer such advice, since to do so rests on no social warrant, and violates the abstract and neutral nature of the discipline itself.I argue that philosophers not only can offer such consultations but ought to. To be a bystander when one's (...) discipline does offer insights and methods of value discernment is pusillanimous. But this position requires a view of clinical medical ethics as one that arises out of the clinical practice of medicine, and not just from an application of general ethical principles to the practice of medicine. I conclude with some skills that trained philosophers can bring to the consultation service, and note that all consultations are in the form of recommendations that the patient, family, and physician are still free to accept or reject. Philosophers in the clinical setting do not make decisions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The emergence of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has wide-ranging implications for the field of professional psychology. As clinical practice has rapidly adapted to ensure continuity of care, doctoral students have encountered unique opportunities for ethics-related competency development across practicum training settings. This article discusses the relevant American Psychological Association Ethics Code standards and additional ethical considerations facing trainees as they navigate their foundational clinical experiences and develop as professional psychologists in light of a pandemic.

This is the first book-length study of the development of civility in Chinese societies. Although some social scientists and political philosophers have discussed civility, none has defined it as an analytical tool to systematically measure attitudes and behavior, and few have applied it to a non-Western society. By comparing the development of civility in mainland China and Taiwan, Civility and Its Development: The Experiences of China and Taiwan analyzes the social conditions needed for civility to become established in a society. (...) Schak argues that the attempts to impose civility top-down from the state are ineffective. Civility appeared in Taiwan only after state efforts to impose it ceased at the end of the 1980s when Taiwan began to democratize, and the PRC government civility campaigns have so far had only limited success. The book concludes with an examination of various differences between Taiwan and the PRC relevant to Taiwan’s having become a society with civility while the PRC still encounters difficulties in doing so. The essential factor in developing civility in Taiwan, Schak contends, was its evolution from a place composed of myriad small, inward-looking communities to a society in which everyone shares a strong identity and civic consciousness, and people consider others as fellow members, not anonymous strangers. “This book represents the most thorough review of what social scientists once called ‘the civilizing process’ in Chinese society. David C. Schak builds on the earlier studies on this issue and goes well beyond the established literature.” —James Watson, Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, Harvard University “This is a topic that people talk about all the time, and David C. Schak draws a lot of material together in a systematic and comprehensive way that can stimulate important discussions beyond the academy.” —Thomas Gold, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Balancing Act: The New Medical Ethics of Medicine's New Economics. By E. Haavi Morreim.

We (Patterson & Plaut, 2009) argued that cognitive neuropsychology has had a limited impact on cognitive science due to a nearly exclusive reliance on (a) single‐case studies, (b) dissociations in cognitive performance, and (c) shallow, box‐and‐arrow theorizing, and we advocated adopting a case‐series methodology, considering associations as well as dissociations, and employing explicit computational modeling in studying “how the brain does its cognitive business.” In reply, Coltheart (2010) claims that our concern is misplaced because cognitive neuropsychology is concerned only with (...) studying the mind, in terms of its “functional architecture,” without regard to how this is implemented in the brain. In this response, we do not dispute his characterization of cognitive neuropsychology as it has typically been practiced over the last 40 years, but we suggest that our understanding of brain structure and function has advanced to the point where studying the mind without regard to the brain is unwise and perpetuates the field’s isolation. (shrink)

To provide the three-way comparisons needed to test existing theories, we compared (1) most-stressful memories to other memories and (2) involuntary to voluntary memories (3) in 75 community dwelling adults with and 42 without a current diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Each rated their three most-stressful, three most-positive, seven most-important and 15 word-cued autobiographical memories, and completed tests of personality and mood. Involuntary memories were then recorded and rated as they occurred for 2 weeks. Standard mechanisms of cognition and (...) affect applied to extreme events accounted for the properties of stressful memories. Involuntary memories had greater emotional intensity than voluntary memories, but were not more frequently related to traumatic events. The emotional intensity, rehearsal, and centrality to the life story of both voluntary and involuntary memories, rather than incoherence of voluntary traumatic memories and enhanced availability of involuntary traumatic memories, were the properties of autobiographical memories associated with PTSD. (shrink)

In recent years, Bayesian probability theory has emerged not only as a powerful tool for building computational theories of vision, but also as a general paradigm for studying human visual perception. This book provides an introduction to and critical analysis of the Bayesian paradigm. Leading researchers in computer vision and experimental vision science describe general theoretical frameworks for modeling vision, detailed applications to specific problems and implications for experimental studies of human perception. The book provides a dialogue between different perspectives (...) both within chapters, which draw on insights from experimental and computational work, and between chapters, through commentaries written by the contributors on each other's work. Students and researchers in cognitive and visual science will find much to interest them in this thought-provoking collection. (shrink)

We explore ways in which purely qualitative belief change in the AGM tradition throws light on options in the treatment of conditional probability. First, by helping see why it can be useful to go beyond the ratio rule defining conditional from one-place probability. Second, by clarifying what is at stake in different ways of doing that. Third, by suggesting novel forms of conditional probability corresponding to familiar variants of qualitative belief change, and conversely. Likewise, we explain how recent work on (...) the qualitative part of probabilistic inference leads to a very broad class of 'proto-probability' functions. (shrink)

Plagiarism has been a long standing concern within higher education. Yet with the rapid rise in the use and availability of the Internet, both the research literature and media have raised the notion that the online environment is accelerating the decline in academic ethics. The majority of research that has been conducted to investigate such claims have involved self-report data from students. This study sought to collect empirical data to investigate the potential influence the prevalence of the Internet has had (...) on significant higher education artifacts by comparing dissertations written prior to widespread use of the Internet with those written in a period in ubiquitous Internet use. Due to the prestige associated with the doctoral degree and the fact that the majority of the effort necessary to achieve such a degree resides within the dissertation, this study utilized Doctor of Philosophy dissertations written in English and published by accredited universities in the U.S. and Canada. A sample of 384 dissertations were analyzed by Turnitin plagiarism detection software. The mean similarity indices for pre-Internet and post-Internet eras were 14.5 and 12.3 %, respectively. A Mann Whitney U test indicated that the differences between groups was significant, however opposite than has been purported within the exigent literature. When comparing the counts of dissertations for each time era considering those with plagiarism versus those that had little/no evidence thereof, there was no statistically significant difference. The findings of this study suggest that the Internet may not be significantly impacting the prevalence of plagiarism in advanced levels of higher education. (shrink)

Ten years of educational reform have not brought dramatic improvements. In Ideology and Educational Reform, David Paris traces the underlying ideological problems that make genuine reform difficult. These include different and often conflicting beliefs concerning the proper role of public education as well as the public's natural ambivalence about schools as government agencies.Paris describes three major themes in public education—common school, human capital, and clientelism. He critically evaluates current policies and proposed reforms associated with each of these topics, including (...) moral education, the school-economy relationship, school choice, and the delivery of social services. Paris proposes better ways for dealing with ideological problems in school practice, and he suggests appropriate directions for policy reform. (shrink)

A position has been advanced by a number of philosophers, notably by Burnham and Skilleås, that certain knowledge is required to aesthetically appreciate a fine wine. They further argue that pleasure is not an integral part of aesthetically appreciating wine. Their position implies that a novice cannot aesthetically appreciate a fine wine. This paper draws on research into tasting and psychology to rebut these claims. I argue that there is strong evidence from both the average consumer and from wine experts (...) that they are unable to separate enjoyment from aesthetic evaluation; secondly, I argue that wine knowledge may actually preclude tasting of the wine as it exists in the glass due to perceptual bias. I conclude by arguing that it is unclear how exactly knowledge of things like terroir is supposed to affect the taste, as well as question what role conforming to a certain style plays in aesthetic success, as arguments that require knowledge for appreciation typically emphasize knowledge of styles of wine. (shrink)

This overview of the "sister arts" of the nineteenth century by younger scholars in art history, literature, and American studies presents a startling array of perspectives on the fundamental role played by images in culture and society. Drawing on the latest thinking about vision and visuality as well as on recent developments in literary theory and cultural studies, the contributors situate paintings, sculpture, monument art, and literary images within a variety of cultural contexts. The volume offers fresh and sometimes extended (...) discussions of single works as well as reevaluations of artistic and literary conventions and analyses of the economic, social, and technological forces that gave them shape and were influenced by them in turn. A wide range of figures are significantly reassessed, including the painters Charles Willson Peale, Washington Allston, Thomas Cole, George Caleb Bingham, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Mary Cassatt, and such writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and William Dean Howells. One overarching theme to emerge is the development of an American national subjectivity as it interacted with the transformation of a culture dominated by religious values to one increasingly influenced by commercial imperatives. The essays probe the ways in which artists and writers responded to the changing conditions of the cultural milieu as it was mediated by such factors as class and gender, modes of perception and representation, and conflicting ideals and realities. (shrink)

It is quite extraordinary, philosophically speaking, that according to the orthodox interpretation: (a) quantum mechanics is a complete and comprehensive theory of microphysics, and yet (b) the role of measurement, in quantum mechanics, cannot be analyzed in terms of the collective effects of the microphysical particles making up the apparatus. It follows that, if the orthodox interpretation is correct, the measurement apparatus and its quantum physical effects cannot be accounted for microreductively. This is significant because it is widely believed that (...) the relation between physical wholes and parts is microreductive. Indeed, many philosophers are persuaded of the inevitability of universal microreduction to the basic elements of microphysics. This is the viewpoint embodied in the program for the unity of science, espoused in recent years, most notably by Robert Causey (1977). (shrink)

While environmental claims are increasingly used by companies to appeal consumers, they also attract greater scrutiny from independent parties interested in consumer protection. Consumers are now able to compare corporate environmental claims against external, often disconfirming, information to form their brand attitudes and purchase intentions. What remains unclear is how the level of information specificity of both the environmental claims and external disconfirming information interact to influence consumer reactions. Two experiments address this gap in the CSR communication literature. When specific (...) claims are countered by specific external information, consumers report more negative brand attitudes and lower purchase intentions. The effect is serially mediated by skepticism toward the claims and lack of corporate credibility. We conclude by discussing strategies that firms can utilize to avoid information dilution and ensure that external disconfirming information percolates to consumers as specific. (shrink)

Field and Hineline have shown how pervasive and insidious is the tendency to make dispositional attributions, even among those who criticize the practice, and they identify a bias for models of contiguous causation as one reason for this tendency. They argue that order can be found at multiple scales of analysis and that in some cases a translation to a model of contiguous causation is impossible. I suggest that pragmatic considerations are sufficient to justify a particular scale of analysis and (...) observe that behavioral principles are fundamentally extended in time. However, I argue that accounting for variance is the goal of science; when events at one level are indeed mediated by those at another, more of the variance can be accounted for by considering both, and there is no principled reason for considering only one. (shrink)

I offer a critical analysis of a view that has become a dominant aspect of recent thought on the relationship between evolution and morality, and propose an alternative. An ingredient in Michael Ruse's 'error theory' (Ruse 1995) is that belief in moral (prescriptive, universal, and nonsubjective) guidelines arose in humans because such belief results in the performance of adaptive cooperative behaviors. This statement relies on two particular connections: between ostensible and intentional types of altruism, and between intentional altruism and morality. (...) The latter connection is problematic because it makes morality redundant, its role having already been fulfilled by the psychological dispositions that constitute intentional altruism. Both behavioral ecology and moral psychology support this criticism, and neither human behavioral flexibility nor the self-regard / other-regard distinction can provide a defense of the error theory. I conclude that morality did not evolve to curb rampant selfishness; instead, the evolutionarily recent 'universal law' aspect of morality may function to update behavioral strategies which were adaptive in the paleolithic environment of our ancestors (to which our psychological dispositions are best adapted), by means of norms more appropriate to our novel social environment. (shrink)