The government purchasing market constitutes the largest business sector in the world. While marketers would benefit from a deep understanding of both sectors, how the two sectors differ in terms of ethics and strategy largely remains unknown. The purpose of this research, therefore, is to explore differences between the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors on two critical aspects of business-to-business procurement: ethics and strategy. Using survey data from a sample of 328 procurement professionals in the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors, key differences (...) are explored. Findings suggest that buyers in the for-profit sector are more likely to behave opportunistically. Conversely, the buyers’ leaders in the not-for-profit sector behave more opportunistically and are more willing to turn a blind eye to their subordinate buyers’ opportunistic behaviors. In addition, key differences in procurement strategy are unveiled suggesting that not-for-profit procurement practices have some room for improvement. Based on the findings, theoretical and managerial implications are drawn, and a future research agenda is proposed. (shrink)

If beliefs are a map by which we steer, then, ceteris paribus, we should want a more accurate map. However, the world could be structured so as to punish learning with respect to certain topics—by learning new information, one’s situation could be worse than it otherwise would have been. We investigate whether the world is structured so as to punish learning specifically about moral nihilism. We ask, if an ordinary person had the option to learn the truth about moral nihilism, (...) ought she to take it? We argue, given plausible assumptions about ordinary human preferences, she should not. (shrink)

SummaryA national scientific community developed in the United States following the American Revolution. The independent scientific societies, journals and other institutions that formed the basis of this community were, however, centred in the North. An analysis of the work of four leading natural historians of the Southern tidewater (two from before the Revolution and two from after it) suggests that their region participated in this development by shifting scientific ties and allegiances from Europe to the North rather than by creating (...) national or regional scientific institutions. (shrink)

This paper is a reconsideration of Platonic dialogues in the light of Taoist insights. The application of Socratic Ignorance to the entire corpus of Plato reveals the yin and yang not only in the internal dialogue between Socrates and Plato, but also between Plato and his reader. Furthermore, this approach brings to the surface the necessity of the dialectic relation between the yang of Western analysis and the yin of Asian intuition to the revelation of the Tao.

In the famous Correspondence with Clarke, which took place during the last year of Leibniz's life, Leibniz advanced several arguments purporting to refute the absolute theory of space and time that was held by Newton and his followers. The main aim of this book is to reassess Leibniz's attack on the Newtonian theory in so far as he relied on the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. The theological side of the controversy is not ignored but isolated and discussed in (...) the last three chapters, which deal with problems connected with the notions of omnipotence and omniscience. (shrink)

The term, “bioethics” was coined in 1970 by American cancerologist V. R. Potter. In the few decades since, the field of bioethics has emerged as an important discipline. The field has attained a remarkable degree of public recognition in a relatively short period of time. The “right to die” cases such as In re Quinlan placed bioethical issues on the front pages. Although the discipline is of recent vintage, the past quarter century has witnessed a flurry of scholarly activity, creating (...) a substantial body of bioethical literature. Moreover, the bioethics movement has manifested itself in institutional expressions. Universities and medical schools have added courses in bioethics to their curricula. In 1974, federal legislation and regulations mandated that federal grantees conducting human subjects research establish institutional review boards to safeguard subjects’ welfare, and even absent a legislative mandate numerous hospitals created ethics committees. Centers and institutes, devoted exclusively to the study of bioethical issues, have been founded. (shrink)

Using Daoism expressed by Chuang Tzu and the Confucianism in The Analects, The Great Learning, and the Mencius, this paper compares and contrasts Daoism and Confucianism as business ethics. In addition, it applies Daoism and Confucianism to several business cases.

The traditional view of tax holds that consumption taxes fail tax the yield to capital, whereas income taxes do, leading to John Stuart Mill's criticism of the income tax as a "double tax" on wealth that is saved. A better analytic understanding illustrates that there are two types of consumption taxes. A prepaid consumption or (equivalently) wage tax indeed ignores the yield to capital. But a consistent progressive postpaid consumption tax gets at such yield, at the individual level, when but (...) only when the returns to capital are used to elevate lifestyles in material terms. Such a tax allows "ordinary" savings that move around labor earnings, in constant dollar terms, to different periods of an individual's life, such as times of retirement or heightened medical or educational needs. Because a progressive postpaid consumption tax falls on the yield to capital at the right time-when its use at the individual level becomes manifest-all other taxes on capital, such as capital gains, gift and estate, and corporate income taxes, can and should be repealed, in the name of fairness. Footnotesa I thank the editors, my research assistants Alex Baskin and Nina Kang, and the other contributors to this volume for their helpful comments. (shrink)

Eleventh-century Europe was dominated by a single political and economic elite with position based on control of the means of coercion; by the end of the fifteenth. century there were various elites with power based on control of some form of production. Theories based on trade, population, and the class struggle have been advanced to account for this change but are inadequate because they posit causal relationships running from some single independent factor. A different form of explanation emphasizes the network (...) of relationships among economic and political units. Here economic power is crucial. The development of new technology shifted the economic leverage of the nobility to the mer chants, then to town craftsmen, with detailed effects on all other economic relationships. The argument is primarily theoretical, not a reconstruction of events, and a mathematical model is provided. (shrink)

A major focus of ethical argumentation is determining the relative merits of proposed ethical systems. Nevertheless, even the demonstration that a given ethical system was the one most likely to be correct would not establish that an agent should act in accord with that system. Consider, for example, a situation in which the ethical system most likely to be valid is modestly supportive of a certain action, whereas a less plausible system strongly condemns the same action. Should the agent perform (...) the action, arguing that the most plausible system supports doing so, or avoid the action, being conservative about the strong condemnation of it from a less plausible system? I argue that, in general, different ethical frameworks see the ethical world in fundamentally different ways, rendering the comparison of degrees of support and opposition of actions between systems intrinsically invalid. One should indeed choose to act in accord with the most defensible system. I believe that this important topic needs more attention than it has gotten to date. (shrink)

This translation and commentary on Xunzi’s Tian Lun argues against naturalistic interpretations of Tian. Tracing the course of interpretation of Xunzi down to the present, discussing some of the influences that affected how he was understood, and raising questions about some contemporary revisionary attempts, Machle suggests unusual lines of interpretation.

In Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court made its first major pronouncement on the evaluation of scientific evidence, calling on judges to act as gatekeepers for scientific knowledge and validity, despite lack of scientific training among judges. Daubert offers the science studies community a case study for examining how judges engage in boundary-work and construct scientific validity. In constructing scientific validity under Daubert, judges must evaluate the scientific method behind a particular scientific claim, and will look (...) to the parties' experts and the relevant scientific community for assistance. To combat the oft-cited problem of the battle of the experts, judges may be tempted to obtain assistance from court-appointed neutral experts, an inquisitorial system in the civil law tradition of many European countries. The judicial evaluation of scientific evidence, the resulting construction of scientific validity, and the push for a greater use of court-appointed experts reveal judges' desire to segregate "objective" scientific facts from aspects of the legal process that are infused with adversaries' values. Yet the scientific and judicial construction of validity mixes empirical results and research methods with the personal, political, and institutional values of judges and scientists. (shrink)