It is a constitutional demand for judges to be objective. Ethical codes show that objectivity depends on rules enabling individuals to counter their subjectivity. Yet these codes focus on judges’ general behaviour while methodology strives for objectivity in the judges’ core task of applying the law on a specific case. Various methods are examined whether they guarantee or at least contribute to an objective interpretation of the law within the existing margin of interpretation. Conscious application of methodology is elaborated upon (...) as a demand of a democratic state under the rule of law. While the principle of judicial independence already limits control of the external result of the adjudication process, it is almost impossible to control the internal process of applying the law that takes place only inside the judge’s head. Thus, it is up to each judge to ensure objectivity by internally binding themselves to a conscious application of methods - therefore constituting an ethical demand. (shrink)

This paper examines the success of corporate communication in voluntary sustainability reporting. Existing studies have focused on the perspective of the communicators but lack an understanding of the perspective of information recipients to clearly evaluate this interactive communication process. This paper looks at the issue of a credibility gap perceived by external stakeholders when they doubt the authenticity of communicated information due to the reporting company’s governance structure. The paper uses family businesses to exemplify the emergence of such a gap (...) when outsiders become concerned about the potential agency problem of the integrated ownership and management controlled by a few members of the same family. Following source credibility theory, these concerns raise a credibility gap associated with a family firm’s trustworthiness and goodwill, even if the family has the expertise to carry out sustainability reporting. The findings of two experimental studies indicate that family businesses suffer a greater credibility gap than non-family businesses. An external and independent assurance service can mitigate such gaps, especially when the service is comprehensive and targets family businesses. The paper provides a complete view evaluating corporate communication by looking at the interaction between the communicating company and the information recipients. (shrink)

Using a sample of Chinese listed firms for the period of 2004–2010, this study examines the impact of religion on corporate philanthropic giving. Based on hand-collected data of religion and corporate philanthropic giving, we provide strong and robust evidence that religion is significantly positively associated with Chinese listed firms’ philanthropic giving. This finding is consistent with the view that religiosity has remarkable effects on individual thinking and behavior, and can serve as social norms to influence corporate philanthropy. Moreover, religion and (...) corporate philanthropic giving have a significantly weaker (less pronounced) positive association for state-owned enterprises than for non-state-owned enterprises. The results are robust to a variety of sensitivity tests. Our results highlight religious influence on corporate philanthropic giving in contemporary China, an old traditional country with a typical communist economy. (shrink)

This research examines the effect of an individual difference variable that reflects the extent to which one desires positive evaluations from others—that is, face consciousness on consumer energy-saving behavior—as well as the mechanism through which the effect occurs and conditions under which it varies. Drawing upon the means-end theory of lifestyles, we propose that face consciousness increases a status-seeking lifestyle and thus decreases energy-saving behavior. Moreover, the negative relationship between status-seeking lifestyle and energy-saving behavior is contingent upon a perceived seriousness (...) of environmental problems and perceived environmental responsibility, such that the indirect and negative effect of such face consciousness is stronger for consumers who perceive less serious environmental problems and less environmental responsibility. Results from an experimental study and a field study using samples of Chinese consumers provide consistent evidence for the hypothesized model. Theoretical and practical implications for energy-saving behavior are also discussed. (shrink)

Public welfare fundraising has been used to collect donations for medical supplies and has played an important role in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper studies online crowdfunding donations from the Alumni Association of Wuhan University to North American alumni; donation data are used to investigate how individuals' donation behavior is affected by the previous donation amount and information provided by the fundraising platform. First, our results show that one's donation amount is positively affected by the previous donation (...) amount. Second, the donor's positive sentiment in the message that he or she leaves, as measured by either natural language processing or a manual rating, can affect the subsequent anonymity and messages but not the subsequent donation amount. Third, anonymous donations are much smaller than non-anonymous donations. (shrink)

ObjectiveThe objective of the study was to explore the relationship between social support and fatigue as well as the mediating role of social functioning on that relationship.BackgroundPsychosocial factors such as social support and social functioning may influence patients’ fatigue symptoms. There is limited evidence on the relationship between social support, social functioning, and fatigue in liver transplant recipients.MethodsA total of 210 patients with liver transplants from two tertiary hospitals were enrolled in the current study. Questionnaires used include one for general (...) demographic data, the Perceived Social Support Scale, Social Disability Screening Schedule, and Fatigue Symptom Inventory.ResultsA total of 126 recipients reported fatigue. Gender, residence, BMI, and liver function were the primary factors affecting fatigue. Social support was positively correlated with social functioning and was negatively correlated with fatigue. The effect of social support on fatigue was partially mediated by social functioning.ConclusionThe fatigue of liver transplant recipients should be attended to. The higher the social support, the lower the fatigue of liver transplant recipients. Social support may also reduce fatigue through social functioning. The liver transplant team should help the liver transplant recipient establish a social support system, restore social functioning, and reduce fatigue symptoms. (shrink)

With the rapid expansion of parameters in large language models (LLMs) and the application of Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), there has been a noticeable growth in the moral competence of LLMs. However, several questions warrant further exploration: Is it really possible for LLMs to fully align with human values through RLHF? How can the current moral growth be philosophically contextualized? We identify similarities between LLMs’ moral growth and Deweyan ethics in terms of the discourse of human moral development. (...) We then attempt to use Dewey’s theory on an experimental basis to examine and further explain the extent to which the current alignment pathway enables the development of LLMs. A beating experiment serves as the foundational case for analyzing LLMs’ moral competence across various parameters and stages, including basic moral cognition, moral dilemma judgment, and moral behavior. The results demonstrate that the moral competence of the GPT series has seen a significant improvement, and Dewey’s Impulse-Habit-Character theory of moral development can be used to explain this: the moral competence of LLMs has been enhanced through experience-based learning, supported by human feedback. Nevertheless, LLMs’ moral development through RLHF remains constrained and does not reach the character stage described by Dewey, possibly due to their lack of self-consciousness. This fundamental difference between humans and LLMs underscores both the limitations of LLMs’ moral growth and the challenges of applying RLHF for AI alignment. It also emphasizes the need for external societal governance and legal regulation. (shrink)

Management literature has repeatedly shown that an absence of voice can have serious negative influences on team and organization performance. However, employees often withhold suggestions or advices when they have ideas, concerns, or opinions. The present study proposes leader behavioral integrity as a key antecedent of employee voice, and investigates how and when leader behavioral integrity influences employee voice. Specifically, we argue that leader behavioral integrity affects employee voice via team independence climate. In addition, we propose a moderating effect of (...) corporate ethical values. The results from a study of 134 managers and 408 employees provide support for this moderated mediation model. Leader behavioral integrity positively affects employee voice via team independence climate, but only when ethical values are emphasized in organizations. These results suggest that leader behavioral integrity, along with team independence climate and corporate ethical values, is very important for fostering employee voice. (shrink)

According to upper echelon theory, this research seeks to explore how environmental leadership (EL) influences environmental performance through green intellectual capital (GIC), while also considering environmental climate as a moderator. We analyze the data from 317 Chinese manufacturing companies in two waves to test these hypotheses. The findings suggest that EL positively affects environmental performance via green structural capital and green relational capital (GRC). Moreover, environmental climate strengthens the impacts of EL on green human capital and GRC. This research enriches (...) the existing literature on EL and GIC by revealing the vital roles of EL in promoting environmental performance and GIC, as well as explaining the mechanism between these relationships. (shrink)

Young netizens are an emerging generator of online content, engaging in an increasing number of online flaming interactions. This shortened communication mode has incorporated power amplifiers, enabling the inclusion of both verbal and non-verbal triggers, thereby initiating abuses akin to cyberbullying. Cyberbullying has emerged as an extremely unstable hot issue, which is difficult to regulate upstream, severely impacting inexperienced young netizens. This Machiavellian apparatus proves to be sophisticated, given its powerful nature, and results in its victims being ensnared in a (...) cyber net from which they see very little escape. Laws have been enacted to combat cyberbullying, which is rampant among netizens, highly naive or actively aggressive in their use of various social media platforms. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, EarlyView.

Intersubjectivity, the existing way of humans in discourse, is the speakers’ concern over the hearers. A framework for the dynamic construction of discourse intersubjectivity by integrating philosophical and cognitive perspectives was proposed to reveal the essential philosophical and cognitive attributes of discourse intersubjectivity. Qualitative analysis and speculative methods were employed. Intersubjectivity in discourse and its dynamic construction process were investigated from speaker orientation, hearer orientation and social interaction orientation. The results show the following: (1) the proposed framework clarifies the dynamic (...) construction of discourse meaning from objectivity to subjectivity and intersubjectivity; (2) speaker orientation focuses on the dynamic construction of discourse meaning from objectivity to subjectivity; (3) hearer orientation emphasises the dynamic construction of discourse meaning from subjectivity to intersubjectivity; (4) social interaction orientation concerns the interaction between speakers and hearers in social discursive practices. The study broadens the research perspective of intersubjectivity, provides a feasible analysis framework to deeply explore intersubjectivity, helps dig up the role of humans as communicative subjects in discourse and communication, and explores the implicit interaction between speakers and hearers. (shrink)

In this essay we explore extensive modes of enactive engagement among humans, physical and computational media richer than the modes represented by classical notions of interaction and relation. We make use of a radically material and a potential-theoretic account of event to re-conceive ad hoc, non-pre-schematized activity in responsive environments. We can regard such activity as sense-making via dehomogenization of material that co-articulates subjects and objects.

Given the current popularization of computer programming and the trends of informatization and digitization, colleges have actively responded by making programming lessons compulsory for students of all disciplines. However, students from different ethnic groups often have different learning responses to such lessons due to their respective cultural backgrounds, the environment in which they grew up, and their consideration for future employment. In this study, an AI-assisted programming module was developed and used to compare the differences between multi-ethnic college students in (...) terms of their theoretical and actual learning expectancy, motivation, and effectiveness. The module conducted analysis through the deep learning network and examined the relevant processes that the students underwent during programming lessons, as well as the types of errors they had committed. Their learning motivation for and actual learning performance in programming were then examined based on the cognitive learning theory. The results of the experiment, which involved 96 multi-ethnic college students, indicated that the two groups had dissimilar theoretical performance in terms of their expectancy and motivation for learning programming. The indigenous students’ main concern was whether programming would affect their families or tribes, and this concern affected and was reflected in their learning outcomes. In contrast, the learning motivation and goals of Han Chinese students were driven by the cognition of the value of programming to themselves. The research findings can contribute toward the cognition and understanding of multi-ethnic students when learning computer programming and development of the appropriate teaching methods, and serve as a reference for subsequent research on integrating multiculturalism into computer programming lessons. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Charles Foster argued that the epistemic uncertainties surrounding prolonged disorders of consciousness make it impossible to prove that the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment can be in a patient’s best interests and, therefore, the presumption in favour of the maintenance of life cannot be rebutted. In the present response, I argue that, from a legal perspective, Foster has reached the wrong conclusion because he is asking the wrong question. According to the reasoning in two leading cases —Bland (...) and James —the principle of respect for autonomy creates a persuasive presumption against treatment without consent. Therefore, it is the continuation of treatment that requires justification, rather than its withdrawal. This presumption also works as the tiebreaker determining that treatment should stop if there is no persuasive evidence that its continuation is in the best interests of the patient. The presumption in favour of the maintenance of life, on the other hand, should be understood as an evidential presumption on a factual issue that is assumed to be true if unchallenged. However, the uncertainties regarding PDOC actually give reasons for displacing this evidential presumption. Consequently, decision-makers will have to weigh up the pros and cons of treatment having the presumption against treatment without consent as the tiebreaker if the evidence is inconclusive. In conclusion, when the right question is asked, Foster’s argument can be turned on its head and uncertainties surrounding PDOC weigh in to justify the interruption of treatment in the absence of compelling contrary evidence. (shrink)

Corporate financial misconduct has garnered increased interest in business ethics research. Although prior research has provided insights into the consequences of financial misconduct, our understanding of why investors react differently to similar instances of misconduct, especially in emerging markets, remains limited. In this study, we first argue that direct information on the severity of misconduct is the primary basis for investors’ evaluations. Next, drawing on screening theory, we theorize that in contexts characterized by high information asymmetry, indirect information about existing (...) firm commitment cues plays a vital screening role by demonstrating the firm’s legitimacy and capability. Subsequently, we develop a tripod framework that integrates the social, market, and strategy dimensions as firm commitment cues that serve as fundamental screening mechanisms to mitigate the adverse effect of misconduct severity on investor reactions. We use a sample of 344 Chinese listed firms that engaged in financial misconduct during 2009–2019 and find that greater misconduct severity results in more negative investor reactions. However, this negative relationship is weakened when the firm demonstrates stronger social and strategy commitments but not stronger market commitment. (shrink)

This study aims to examine key attributes affecting Airbnb users' satisfaction and dissatisfaction through the analysis of online reviews. A corpus that comprises 59,766 Airbnb reviews form 27,980 listings located in 12 different cities is analyzed by using both Latent Dirichlet Allocation and supervised LDA approach. Unlike previous LDA based Airbnb studies, this study examines positive and negative Airbnb reviews separately, and results reveal the heterogeneity of satisfaction and dissatisfaction attributes in Airbnb accommodation. In particular, the emergence of the topic (...) “guest conflicts” in this study leads to a new direction in future sharing economy accommodation research, which is to study the interactions of different guests in a highly shared environment. The results of topic distribution analysis show that in different types of Airbnb properties, Airbnb users attach different importance to the same service attributes. The topic correlation analysis reveals that home like experience and help from the host are associated with Airbnb users' revisit intention. We determine attributes that have the strongest predictive power to Airbnb users' satisfaction and dissatisfaction through the sLDA analysis, which provides valuable managerial insights into priority setting when developing strategies to increase Airbnb users' satisfaction. Methodologically, this study contributes by illustrating how to employ novel approaches to transform social media data into useful knowledge about customer satisfaction, and the findings can provide valuable managerial implications for Airbnb practitioners. (shrink)

Hung Yao-hsün is one of the most creative, albeit long overlooked, thinkers in Japanese-ruled Taiwan. This paper’s aim is threefold. It first argues that while Hung’s early philosophy was rooted in the Kyoto school, he is a key founder of the Sit-chûn movement of Taiwanese philosophy. It next shows that during Taiwan’s martial law, Hung’s thought features a “Buddhist turn,” in which Zen is incorporated within existentialism. Third, while this turn is a sharp contrast to his prewar philosophical activism, Hung’s (...) last work stressed Abraham Kaplan’s view that philosophy should be connected to one’s life experience, echoing Hung’s prewar usage of fūdo in justifying Taiwan’s cultural subjectivity. In other words, there is an implicit continuity between his early and late philosophy. (shrink)

One can use mathematics not as an instrument or measure, or a replacement for God, but as a poetic articulation, or perhaps as a stammered experimental approach to cultural dynamics. I choose to start with the simplest symbolic substances that respect the lifeworld’s continuous dynamism, temporality, boundless morphogenesis, superposability, continuity, density and value, and yet are independent of measure, metric, counting, finitude, formal logic, syntax, grammar, digitality and computability – in short, free of the formal structures that would put a (...) cage over all of the lifeworld. I call these substances topological media. This article introduces elementary topological concepts with which we can articulate material and cultural change using notions of proximity, limit, and change, without recourse to number or metric. The motivation is that topology furnishes us with concepts well-adapted for poietically articulating the world as stuff, rather than objects with an a priori schema. With care, it may provide a fruitful approach to morphogenesis and cultural dynamics that is neither reductive nor anthropocentric. I will not pretend any systematic application of the scaffolding concepts introduced in this article. Instead, I would see what fellow students of cultural dynamics and cosmopolitics make of these concepts in their own work. (shrink)

This study applies the concept of reported speech advanced by the renowned Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin to compare the argumentative styles of Mainland China and Taiwan. These societies in question are considered by many scholars as sharing the same argumentative style. The study reports that the Mainland debaters more frequently than the Taiwanese debaters maintained the authenticity of the quotations cited from ancient Confucian sources, whereas Taiwanese debaters paraphrased more frequently. On the other hand, this difference cannot be found (...) when debaters quoted from sources other than Ancient Confucians. The findings, according to Bakhtin, imply a contrast of monologic and dialogic tendencies toward authority, which results in a style difference between Mainland and Taiwan argumentation. (shrink)

"Culture shock" is the context of a place Yan'an Literature summarized. It has focused on anti-Japanese revolutionary base color of the militarization of social life, for the establishment of a modern nation-state "anxiety" mentality, and the potential "breakthrough" mentality. From the "culture shock" the perspective of Yan'an Literature, enabling Yan'an Literature from the "politics" into a deeper vision of the "cultural" space, and thus enrich our literature and the inherent complexity of Yan'an understanding. Through "culture shock", for the Yan'an Literature (...) we can update the knowledge structure. "Assaulting culture" as a linguistic background of Yan'an literature reflected concentratively the militarized daily living in the revolutionary base area of ​​defending against Japanese invasion, the anxious psychology for setting up a modern national country, and a potential "assaulting" mentality. It can enrich and renew our knowledge of the internal complex of Yan'an literature to study from the perspective of "assaulting culture" since it expands the research fields to from "politics" to "culture". (shrink)

This paper investigates a composite learning prescribed performance control scheme for uncertain strict-feedback system. Firstly, a prescribed performance boundary condition is developed for the tracking error, and the original system is transformed into an equivalent one by using a transformation function. In order to ensure that the tracking error satisfies the PPB, a sufficient condition is given. Then, a control scheme of PPC combined with neural network and backstepping technique is proposed. However, the unknown functions cannot be guaranteed to estimate (...) accurately by this method. To solve this problem, predictive errors are defined by applying online recorded date and instantaneous date. Furthermore, novel composite learning laws are proposed to update NN weights based on a partial persistent excitation condition. Subsequently, the stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed and all signals are kept bounded by using composite learning PPC method. Finally, simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods. (shrink)

Aiming at the two-echelon newsvendor problem in which the market demand of commodities is random both in normal sales period and in liquidation period, this paper studies the pricing and ordering decision of retailers by using rational expectation equilibrium under the condition of considering consumersʼ strategic behavior and rapid response mechanism. Then, the decision-making problem under retailersʼ initial order quantity commitment is discussed, as well as the effect of commitment mechanism on supply chain performance. On this basis, both the two-part (...) pricing contract and revenue-sharing contract are introduced to achieve supply chain coordination aiming at the profit maximization under the initial order quantity commitment mechanism. The results show that the rapid response mechanism can reduce the negative impact of consumers’ strategic behavior, and the initial order quantity commitment can further reduce the impact and improve the retailers’ profit. Both the two-part pricing contract and revenue-sharing contract can coordinate the whole supply chain in which the two-part pricing contract can distribute profit arbitrarily between manufacturers and retailers while the revenue-sharing contract can share risks among members of the supply chain. (shrink)

We attempt to provide a novel antecedent of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by focusing on the role of CSR awards. Specifically, we investigate how competitors’ winning CSR awards incentivize non-winning firms’ CSR as a competitive catch-up. Using a difference-in-differences research design, we find that non-winners improve their CSR after their competitors have won CSR awards. Furthermore, based on the awareness-motivation-capability (AMC) framework from the competitive dynamics literature, we find that the media visibility of award winners, the performance gap of non-winners (...) with award winners, and the prior CSR of non-winners strengthen the CSR competitive catch-up behaviors. Findings from this study contribute to the CSR research by highlighting the spillover effect of CSR awards as a meaningful event in incentivizing non-winning firms’ CSR and extending the AMC framework to explain the contingency factors of competitive catch-up in the context of CSR research. (shrink)

With the continuous development of the stock market, designing a reasonable risk identification tool will help to solve the irrational problem of investors. This paper first selects the stocks with the most valuable investment value in the future through the random forest algorithm in the nine-factor model and then analyzes them by using the higher-order moment model to find that different investors’ preferences will make the weight of the portfolio change accordingly, which will eventually make the optimal return and risk (...) set of the composition of the portfolio change. The risk identification system designed in this paper can provide an effective risk identification tool for investors and help them make rational judgments. (shrink)

The debate between the dynamical and the statistical interpretations of natural selection is centred on the question of whether all explanations that employ the concepts of natural selection and drift are reducible to causal explanations. The proponents of the statistical interpretation answer negatively, but insist on the fact that selection/drift arguments are explanatory. However, they remain unclear on where the explanatory power comes from. The proponents of the dynamical interpretation answer positively and try to reduce selection/drift arguments to some of (...) the most prominent accounts of causal explanation. In turn, they face the criticism raised by statisticalists that current accounts of causation have to be violated in some of their core conditions or otherwise used in a very loose manner in order to account for selection/drift explanations. We propose a reconciliation of both interpretations by conveying evolutionary explanations within the unificationist model of scientific explanation. Therefore, we argue that the explanatory power in natural selection arguments is a result of successful unification of individual- and population-level facts. A short case study based on research on sympatric speciation will be presented as an example of how population- and individual-level facts are unified to explain the morphological mosaic of bill shape in island scrub jays. (shrink)

Background: Freezing of gait is a common symptom in Parkinson’s disease and can be difficult to treat with dopaminergic medications or with deep brain stimulation. Novel stimulation paradigms have been proposed to address suboptimal responses to conventional DBS programming methods. Burst-cycling deep brain stimulation delivers current in various frequencies of bursts, while maintaining an intra-burst frequency identical to conventional DBS.Objective: To evaluate the safety and tolerability of BCDBS in PD patients with FOG.Methods: Ten PD subjects with STN or GPi DBS (...) and complaints of FOG were recruited for this single center, single blinded within-subject crossover study. For each subject, we compared 4, 10, and 15 Hz BCDBS to conventional DBS during the PD medication-OFF state.Results: There were no serious adverse events with BCDBS. It was feasible and straightforward to program BCDBS in the clinic setting. The benefit was comparable to conventional DBS in measures of FOG, functional mobility and in PD motor symptoms. BCDBS had lower battery consumption when compared to conventional DBS.Conclusions: BCDBS was feasible, safe and well tolerated and it has potential to be a viable future DBS programming strategy. (shrink)