La Escolástica Tardía marca un hito en la historia del pensamiento filosófico. En este periodo se establecen las bases de un profundo proceso de transformación en la forma de observar la naturaleza a través de una minuciosa recolección de datos, experimentos y posteriores análisis. El enfoque franciscano da prioridad a aquel sentido práctico del filosofar que se funda sobre la existencia real y desembarca en la acción. Los pensadores franciscanos analizan las realidades del mundo con un dinamismo pragmático sumamente original.

Ethical business practices have been widely prescribed, but why? Consumers views on unethical business practices have been studied, but possibly more important to marketers and researchers are consumer actions and reactions to unethical business practices and the businesses themselves. Do consumers react negatively, or in such a way as to "punish" the unethical business? If so, what is the nature and extent of the punishment? This research seeks answers to these questions by examining consumer reactions, such as complaining and switching, (...) to instances of unethical business practices. Using equity theory, this research proposes that consumers should be willing to tolerate some unethical behavior as long as they feel their investments and outcomes remain proportionately equal. Consumers who perceive that their outcome/investment ratio is proportionately unequal to their comparison other will respond by switching or complaining. In this research consumers were exposed to two types of service failures with different levels of service recovery in vignettes. Costs incurred by the consumer during the service transaction were also manipulated in the vignettes. Significant differences were found for complaint behavior in the failure recovery vignettes tested. Specifically, voice complaint was higher in the high cost service encounters in both types of services tested. The recovery attempt used (ethical, unethical, or none) led to significance differences in the variables of complaint, voice complaint, satisfaction, and quality. Higher satisfaction and quality ratings were found for the ethical recovery attempt and higher intentions to use complaint and voice complaint in the unethical recovery attempts. One significant interaction between cost and recovery attempt was found. Intentions to use voice complaint were higher in the high cost situations of ethical and unethical recovery, while approaching equality at the no recovery attempt. (shrink)

Women's small share of professional and managerial occupations compared with their share of the total labor force is examined for the 11 largest racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. Gender-related characteristics—women's labor force participation rates, marital status, and the sex ratio—influence women's share of the top jobs, as do class and ethnic variables such as place of birth, population size, and class of worker. Labor market gender inequality is greatest among the smaller, more affluent minorities, many of whom (...) are recent immigrants to this country. The larger, frequently indigenous, minority groups exhibit less of this kind of inequality. Minority and gender status intersect, so that men monopolize surplus resources among the more affluent minority groups and use these resources to secure a more advantaged labor market position. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 1 Seiten: 105-123.

What leads humans to divide the social world into groups, preferring their own group and disfavoring others? Experiments with infants and young children suggest these tendencies are based on predispo- sitions that emerge early in life and depend, in part, on natural language. Young infants prefer to look at a person who previously spoke their native language. Older infants preferentially accept toys from native-language speakers, and preschool children preferentially select native-language speakers as friends. Variations in accent are sufficient to evoke (...) these social preferences, which are observed in infants before they produce or comprehend speech and are exhibited by children even when they comprehend the foreign-accented speech. Early-developing preferences for native-language speakers may serve as a foundation for later-developing preferences and conflicts among social groups. (shrink)

This article has four aims. First, it will consider explicitly, and polemically, the hierarchical relationship between conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis. Whilst the CA ‘juggernaut’ flourishes, the MCA ‘milk float’ is in danger of being run off the road. For MCA to survive either as a separate discipline, or within CA as a focus equivalent to other ‘generic orders of conversation’, I suggest it must generate new types of systematic studies and reveal fundamental categorial practices. With such a goal (...) in mind, the second aim of the article is to provide a set of clear analytic steps and procedures for conducting MCA, which are grounded in basic categorial and sequential concerns. Third, the article aims to demonstrate how order can be found in the intuitively ‘messy’ discourse phenomenon of membership categories, and how to approach their analysis systematically as a robust feature of particular action-oriented environments. Through the exemplar analyses, the final aim of the article is to promote MCA as a method for interrogating culture, reality and society, without recourse to its reputed ‘wild and promiscuous’ analytic approach. (shrink)

I argue that our traditional conception of the duties imposed by human rights is unable to acknowledge the nature of many contemporary human rights violations. The traditional conception is based on a broadly deontological view according to which human rights impose primarily negative and perfect duties, and these duties are held to be specific prohibitions on certain kinds of actions . I argue that given this conception of the nature of the duties imposed by human rights, not only claims to (...) aid, but in addition, claims against many of the most serious and prevalent contemporary active harms will not count as genuine human rights claims. These harms increasingly result from extremely complex causal chains involving the behaviour of a huge number of agents, few or none of whom can be singled out as responsible for a serious harm to any specific victim. Institutional structures can have just as central a role to play in specifying and allocating responsibility for fulfilling many of the negative duties imposed by human rights as the positive duties. These structures can therefore be equally important in the realisation of both kinds of rights. Before the necessary institutional reforms have taken place, both kinds of rights are equally genuine, and ground the imperative of justice to reform existing social institutions. (shrink)

Amartya Sen’s ethical theorizing helps feminists resolve the tensions between the claims of women’s particular perspectives and moral objectivity. His concept of ‘‘positional objectivity’’ highlights the epistemological significance of value judgments made from particular social positions, while holding that certain values may become widely shared. He shows how acknowledging positionality is consistent with affirming the universal value of democracy. This article builds on Sen’s work by proposing an analysis of democracy as a set of institutions that aims to intelligently utilize (...) positional information for shared ends. This epistemological analysis of democracy offers a way to understand the rationale for reserving political offices for women. From a political point of view, gendered positions are better thought of as an epistemological resource than as a ground of identity politics – that is, of parochial identification and solidarity. (shrink)

How is the ethics of abortion related to the non-identity problem? Some cases of deciding whether to abort turn out to raise the non-identity problem: for the same reasons that it is morally required to wait to conceive in some temporary condition non-identity cases, it is also morally required to abort some pregnancies. This implies that the following surprising claim is true: sometimes it is morally required to kill a being for its own sake, although continuing to live would be (...) better for it. The paper defends this surprising claim. The paper also argues that we should understand non-identity phenomena more broadly, to encompass cases of affecting what the moral status facts are. This includes affecting who exists, affecting whether beings have moral status, and affecting what level of moral status beings have (if there are levels of moral status). (shrink)

Unethical pro-organisational behaviour is an ongoing concern, prompting the need for more nuanced understanding of the workplace environment most likely to inhibit it. This study considers the role of risk climate, sometimes referred to as risk culture, as well as ethical climate, for reducing UPB. The study investigates whether four risk climate factors can, by focusing on the long-term consequences of UPB to the organisation, and providing guidance on behavioural norms, reduce UPB misconduct. Surveying employees in three financial institutions we (...) found that only one of the risk climate factors, avoidance, is consistently associated with UPB. On the other hand, a self-interested, ethical climate significantly increases UPB in all samples. In multi-climate analysis, we found that risk climate factors interacted with ethical climate to predict UPB. That is, when employees perceive that the workplace ethos is not self-interested, three factors of risk climate—avoidance, proactive and manager—significantly predict UPB. UPB is least likely when self-interest is low, avoidance risk climate is low, proactive risk climate is high and manager risk climate is high. Implications for leaders are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper I evaluate the theoretical and normative validity of Arendt's idea of a public sphere. My discussion is organised under three related headings. First, an exploration of the theme of ‘plurality’ in Arendt's work. This is connected, second, with a distinctive account of the role of ‘representation’ in political life. Third, the relation between ethics and politics, and the particular normativity of Arendt's concept of politics. Finally, I go on to a consideration of how Arendt's scheme of plurality (...) and public political life draw our attention to the themes of political capacity and resistance, risk and public encounter, and an account of the frictional, indeed rebarbative, nature of politics. The aim of the paper is to make clear that these themes remain significant for current debates about participatory deficits and about standards of public conduct. (shrink)

Examination of the subversive nature of philosophy as its students challenge the authority and practices of government agencies and organizations. Draws a series of connections between philosophically oriented protesters and questioners of authority ranging from Socrates to 2004 protesters at the U.S. Republican party’s presidential convention in 2004.

Non-lethal weapons have become an increasingly important class of weapons. Creating these armaments requires examination of ethical issues in their research and development processes. Chief a...

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica - Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies / Revue de l'Association Internationale de Sémiotique Jahrgang: 2013 Heft: 197 Seiten: 267-281.

I am grateful to and honored by the time the authors in this symposium have taken to discuss my recent book Health Problems. I don’t have the space in what follows to fully address the issues they raise, but I hope to highlight some key points of challenge and disagreement, and offer some preliminary responses.

In this essay, Elizabeth Campbell reviews three recent books that address the ethical nature of professional practice: Knowledge and Virtue in Teaching and Learning: The Primacy of Dispositions, by Hugh Sockett; The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice, by Chris Higgins; and Towards Professional Wisdom: Practical Deliberation in the People Professions, edited by Liz Bondi, David Carr, Chris Clark, and Cecelia Clegg. While the first two books are situated within the context of teaching and education, the (...) third book, as an edited volume, contains chapters that represent a multidisciplinary perspective on the work of professionals within nursing, social work, counseling, and the ministry, as well as in teaching. Each of the books engages in the careful inquiry into philosophy broadly and educational philosophy specifically from conceptual frameworks widely associated with Aristotelian virtue ethics. Writing from an applied perspective on the field of scholarship relating to the moral and ethical dimensions of teaching, Campbell applauds the books for their timely reminder of the central role or persona of the individual professional as a moral agent and ethical practitioner. She argues that within the contemporary context of teacher education, which tends either to neglect or narrowly define the ethics of the profession, such an emphasis on the cultivation of personal character and responsibility within a framework of clear ethical dispositions or virtues is a welcome contribution to the field. It enables teachers, teacher educators, and student teachers to concentrate on both the ethics of practice and the practice of ethics in the ongoing quest to further their own development of virtue, practical wisdom, and personal and professional knowledge. (shrink)

Essentially interdisciplinary in nature, this thesis is both historical and speculative. On the one hand, it is an analysis of the Western conception of reason as it formed through the Renaissance and Enlightenment. On the other hand, it offers a conception of reason developed from the Renaissance magi's and nineteenth century Romanticism's emphasis on imagination. Drawing on Leibniz's and Aristotle's definitions of possibility in relation to those of necessity and choice, it delineates the purpose and nature of metaphysics. Modern philosophy's (...) attempt to secure methodological certainty, specifically the Cartesian concept of a mathesis universalis, is interpreted in the light of classical mechanics and its metaphysical assumptions concerning the nature of knowledge. Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, as an example of systematic metaphysics, is presented as the work which culminates the Modern quest for certainty. The Phenomenology is analyzed as articulating most clearly the necessary conditions for objective knowledge, and as demonstrating the impossibility of fulfilling those conditions. Most importantly, however, Hegel's conception of knowldge as a process of consciousness articulated by 'speculative thought' is presented as the significant insight which redefines the task of metaphysics and epistemology. Adopting Hegel's concept of the speculative proposition, the author develops a metaphysical schema which takes as its primary axion the definition of thought as self-constitutive. Using the model of a thought experiment, the author suggests that the hypothetical thinking underlying the scientifc method is fundamentally imaginative, and further, that imaginative thought is a basic dimension of all aspects of human life: the universal that Modern philosophy attempted to secure as the certain ground of knowledge. This hypothesis is amplified and developed through an analysis of language and meaning, focusing specifically on the distinction between literal and figurative language. All language is defined as a figurative image of the constitutive activity of thought, including the scientific language of 'fact' and the metaphysical language of concepts. In conclusion, the author demonstrates that objective knowledge cannot be achieved without the expression of self-constitutive thought. (shrink)

Epicurus held that justice came into being when individuals made compacts with one another to secure the benefit that comes from not harming one another. He also distinguished just laws from those that are not just; and he recognized a virtue of justice. This much is well supported by our evidence. There is also much that is controversial. At the very basis, there is disagreement on his conception of justice. There are also basic questions on how compacts are related to (...) the justice of laws, as well as to the virtue of justice. Plato and Aristotle severed compacts from virtue; and some modern thinkers consider the justice of institutions prior to that of individuals. What was Epicurus’ position? This paper will sketch an outline of Epicurus’ theory of justice as a path to the goal of a pleasant life. As Phillip Mitsis (1988) suggested, Epicurus sought to harmonize a contractual view of justice with the virtue of justice. My aim is to investigate further the coherence of this endeavor. As I will argue, Epicurus presents a unitary theory of justice, composed of a number of steps that develop out of each other in a consistent way. As a developmental path, it admits of much variation. By tracing its basic features, I seek to show how Epicurus puts individuals in charge of attaining their goal, pleasure. (shrink)

I think of Health Problems as having two main themes – one specific to the subject matter of health, the other more broadly methodological. The former is simply that health is distinctively philoso...

Mature representations of number are built on a core system of numerical representation that connects to spatial representations in the form of a ‘mental number line’. The core number system is functional in early infancy, but little is known about the origins of the mapping of numbers onto space. Here we show that preverbal infants transfer the discrimination of an ordered series of numerosities to the discrimination of an ordered series of line lengths. Moreover, infants construct relationships between individual numbers (...) and line lengths that vary positively, but not between numbers and lengths that vary inversely. These findings provide evidence for an early developing predisposition to relate representations of numerical magnitude and spatial length. A central foundation of mathematics, science and technology therefore emerges prior to experience with language, symbol systems, or measurement devices. (shrink)