Due to the pressing environmental and social issues facing the global economic system, the role of organizations in promoting socially responsible behavior among employees warrants attention in research and practice. It has been suggested that the concept of socio-moral climate might be particularly useful for understanding how participative organizational structures and processes shape employees’ prosocial behaviors. While SMC has been shown to be positively related to employees’ prosocial behaviors within the work context, little is known about the potential spillover effects (...) of SMC. The present study aims to address this gap by investigating how and why SMC is related to employees’ socially responsible purchase intention. Drawing on the relational job design framework, we argue that employees’ perceptions of their social impact may explain why SMC is positively related to responsible purchase intentions. We collected data from 492 employees working in various industries at two measurement points with a time lag of 12 months. Hypotheses were tested using path analysis, in which we controlled for the temporal stability of the study variables. The results showed that SMC was positively related to perceived social impact and socially responsible purchase intention and that perceived social impact was positively related to socially responsible purchase intention. In addition, we found a significant indirect relationship between SMC and socially responsible purchase intention through perceived social impact. The findings provide initial support for the spillover of employees’ work-related experiences onto their responsible purchase intentions within the nonwork domain. This study contributes to the literature by extending the traditional focus of SMC research on the development of moral reasoning skills to suggest that perceived social impact is an important mechanism underlying the relationship between SMC and prosocial behaviors. In terms of practical implications, this study suggests that organizational interventions designed to increase SMC may enhance employees’ perceptions of their social impact. (shrink)

In this paper I will examine two responses to the argument from marginal cases; the argument from kinds and the similarity argument. I will argue that these arguments are insufficient to show that all humans have moral status but no animals do. This does not prove that animals have moral status but it does shift the burden of proof onto those who want to maintain that all humans are morally considerable, but no animals are.

An easy, jargon-free introduction to Stoic philosophy and its relevance to modern life. Topics include: the three pillars of Stoic philosophy (logic, physics, and ethics), the Stoic ideal of living in accordance with nature, and the question of whether belief in God is necessary for practicing Stoicism.

Proponents of the argument from regress maintain that the existence of Instrumental Value is sufficient to establish the existence of Intrinsic Value. It is argued that the chain of instrumentally valuable things has to end somewhere. Namely with intrinsic value. In this paper, I shall argue something a little more modest than this. I do not want to argue that the regress argument proves that there is intrinsic value but rather that it proves that the idea of intrinsic value is (...) a necessary part of our thinking about moral value. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Some philosophers (such as Kant and Rawls) think it is only wrong to be cruel to cats because it will make one behave cruelly to humans. This explanation is unsatisfactory. Why? Because being cruel to your cat is a direct wrong to your cat regardless of the effects it has on other humans. Ascribing the wrongness of cruelty to the fact it will make one callous to other humans is to assess the character of the cruel person not the act (...) they are performing. Cruelty to your cat is wrong because it wrongs your cat directly. (shrink)

Background Policy instruments based on the working of markets have been introduced to empower consumers of healthcare. However, it is still not easy to become a critical consumer of healthcare. Objectives The aim of this study is to analyse the possibilities of the state to strengthen the position of patients with the aid of a new financial regime, such as personal health budgets. Methods Data were collected through in-depth interviews with executives, managers, professionals and client representatives of six long-term care (...) institutions. Results With the introduction of individual budgets the responsibility for budgetary control has shifted from the organisational level to the individual level in the caregiver-client relationship. Having more luxurious care on offer necessitates a stronger demarcation of regular care because organisations cannot simultaneously offer extra care as part of the standard care package. New financial instruments have an impact on the culture of receiving and giving care. Distributive justice takes on new meaning with the introduction of financial market mechanisms in healthcare; the distributing principle of ‘need’ is transformed into the principle of ‘economic demand’. Conclusion Financial instruments not only act as a countervailing power against providers insufficiently client-oriented, but are also used by providers to reinforce their own positions vis-à-vis demanding clients. Tailor-made finance is not the same as tailor-made care. (shrink)

The 3rd batch of 6 books in this series on the Greatest philosophers by acclaimed specialists writing for the General reader. From Aristotle to Wittgenstein, from Democritus to Derrida, this series provides a lucid and concise survey of philosophers ancient and modern. Each volume is by an acknowledged expert briefed to address the adventurous but non-specialist reader.

Many Western countries have introduced market principles in healthcare. The newly introduced financial instrument of “care-intensity packages” in the Dutch long-term care sector fit this development since they have some characteristics of a market device. However, policy makers and care providers positioned these instruments as explicitly not belonging to the general trend of marketisation in healthcare. Using a qualitative case study approach, we study the work that the two providers have done to fit these instruments to their organisations and how (...) that enables and legitimatises market development. Both providers have done various types of work that could be classified as market development, including creating accounting systems suitable for markets, redefining public values in the context of markets, and starting commercial initiatives. Paradoxically, denying the existence of markets for long-term care and thus avoiding ideological debates on the marketisation of healthcare has made the use of market devices all the more likely. Making the market invisible seems to be an operative element in making the market work. Our findings suggest that Dutch long-term care reform points to the need to study the ‘making’ rather than the ‘liberalising’ of markets and that the study of healthcare markets should not be confined to those practices that explicitly label themselves as such. (shrink)

Some may doubt whether the question of equality of opportunity applies to women anymore. In most Western countries every career is now, in theory, open to women. Firstly, while this may be true in Western countries, it is not true in others; there are still many careers barred to women outside the West. However, affirmative action is not a remedy where women are barred from given careers, for in such cases the principle of equality of opportunity has been rejected. Rather, (...) affirmative action is a measure for achieving equality of opportunity. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 108 Heft: 2 Seiten: 247-269.

L'article est basé sur une conférence donnée au Victoria and Albert Muséum à Londres en Mai 2000. Il retrace l'enseignement sur l'eucharistie à travers les vingt et un conciles traditionnellement considérés oecuméniques par l'Eglise Catholique Romaine, de Nicée à Vatican II . Tous les conciles n'ont pas parlé de l'eucharistie; mais ceux qui l'ont fait ont apporté de profondes intuitions sur le sacrement central du Christianisme. L'auteur résume ces développements comme suit: …les premiers conciles se préoccupent en priorité des personnes (...) présentes à l'eucharistie; les conciles du Moyen-Age et celui de Trente tournent leur attention vers le prêtre, les objets employés pour faire l'eucharistie, et spécialement la présence du Christ. Vatican II renoue avec la préoccupation de l'ancienne Eglise pour les gens présents a l'eucharistie, mais avec des intérêts différents. (shrink)

This book is the first comprehensive study on Moses Mendelssohn's (1729-1786) language philosophy. While guiding the reader throughhis oeuvre, a new perspective is gained that brings Mendelssohn closer to the skeptical currents of Enlightenment. The dialectics of human and sacred language play a constitutive role for his language theory as well as for his aesthetics and metaphysics, and finally lead into the political idea of a just, social order. Thus, he developed an important alternative to monolingual, national language concepts.

All else being equal, can granting the objective purport of moral experience support a presumption in favor of some form of moral objectivism? Don Loeb (2007) has argued that even if we grant that moral experience appears to present us with a realm of objective moral fact—something he denies we have reason to do in the first place—the objective purport of moral experience cannot by itself provide even prima facie support for moral objectivism. In this paper, I contend against Loeb (...) that granting the objective purport of ordinary moral experience is sufficient to support a defeasible presumption in favor of moral objectivism, and this by constituting non-explanatory, comparative confirmation that incrementally raises the prima facie likelihood that moral facts exist. More specifically, I appeal to a modest confirmation principle shared by Likelihoodists and Bayesieans - namely, the Weak Law of Likelihood - in an effort to show that (i) at a minimum, moral experience establishes a middling scrutable probability for a sufficient but not necessary condition of moral objectivism being true, and that (ii) this moderate probability in turn constitutes evidence that makes it prima facie more probable than not that some form of moral objectivism is true. (shrink)

This paper attempts to demonstrate Max Scheler’s anticipation of and continued relevance to a burgeoning trend of essence-based accounts of modality, chief among them being Kit Fine’s landmark 1994 “Essence and Modality.” I argue that Scheler’s account of the material a priori not only anticipates the picture of essence-based modality suggested by Fine, but moreover offers resources with the potential to resolve key challenges for the Finean program. In particular, Fine’s account runs into problems in explaining how formal logical necessities (...) are to be grounded in essences, challenges that put pressure on the essentialist to adopt a non-propositional account of the nature of logical principles. I argue that one such account can be found in Scheler’s notion of the material a priori, according to which all necessary propositional truth is grounded in a realm of experientially given yet a priori "phenomenological facts." After showing the general rapprochement between Scheler’s and Fine’s accounts of regional modality, I then turn to address Scheler’s attempt to ground formal logical principles in essences. On Scheler’s picture, propositions expressing formal logical truths are true in virtue of the domain of essences in two senses: In terms of what Scheler calls objective necessity, they are true insofar as they coincide with the essential facts and interconnections shared by all possible regions of being; In terms of what he calls subjective necessity, they are true in virtue of these same essential facts and interconnections insofar as they have become “functionalized” into law-like patterns of cognition. (shrink)

Tanner uses Kierkegaard's thought, in particular his theory of anxiety, to enrich a bold new reading of Milton's Paradise Lost. He argues that for Milton and Kierkegaard, the path to sin and to salvation lies through anxiety, and that both writers include anxiety within the compass of paradise. The first half of the book explores anxiety in Eden before the Fall, original sin, the aetiology of evil, and prelapsarian knowledge. The second half examines anxiety after the Fall, offering original (...) insights into such issues as the demonic personality, remorse, despair, and faith. (shrink)

A set of qubit channels has a classical representation when it is isomorphic to the convex closure of a group of classical channels. From Crowder and Martin (Proceedings of Quantum Physics and Logic, Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 2009), we know that up to isomorphism there are five such sets, each corresponding to either a subgroup of the alternating group on four letters, or a subgroup of the symmetric group on three letters. In this paper, we show that the (...) classical representation of a qubit channel also carries its information theoretic data—in particular, both the Holevo capacity and the scope of a unital qubit channel can be completely calculated from a systematically determined classical channel. (shrink)

This book examines the role Plato accords to imagination in the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Claiming that the function of imagination evokes a realm of praxis within Plato's dialogues heretofore largely unrecognized, this book offers an interpretation of Plato that challenges the more orthodox view in which poetry and the arts are denigrated, and indeed, seen as eradicable from the dialogues altogether.

Counters the long-standing, solemn interpretation of Plato’s dialogues with one centered on the philosophical and pedagogical significance of Socrates as a comic figure. Plato was described as a boor and it was said that he never laughed out loud. Yet his dialogues abound with puns, jokes, and humor. Sonja Madeleine Tanner argues that in Plato’s dialogues Socrates plays a comical hero who draws heavily from the tradition of comedy in ancient Greece, but also reforms laughter to be applicable to (...) all persons and truly shaming to none. Socrates introduces a form of self-reflective laughter that encourages, rather than stifles, philosophical inquiry. Laughter in the dialogues—both explicit and implied—suggests a view of human nature as incongruous with ourselves, simultaneously falling short of, and superseding, our own capacities. What emerges is a picture of human nature that bears a striking resemblance to Socrates’ own, laughable depiction, one inspired by Dionysus, but one that remains ultimately intractable. The book analyzes specific instances of laughter and the comical from the Apology, Laches, Charmides, Cratylus, Euthydemus, and the Symposium to support this, and to further elucidate the philosophical consequences of recognizing Plato’s laughter. Sonja Madeleine Tanner is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and the author of In Praise of Plato’s Poetic Imagination. (shrink)

Corporate citizenship challenges the foundations and working of the basic institutions market, state and civil society. These institutional changes complicate the work of the manager, because the responsibilities of management are not only increasing, they are also becoming vaguer and more elusive. In this paper, I will analyze the new, complex responsibilities of management in terms of the scope and the legitimizationof corporate citizenship. What may we expect of individual organizations? Which wishes of which stakeholders should be honored? How can (...) we legitimize the new societal and public role of business firms? The outcome of this analysis will be translated to the practice of management; how can we strengthen the social responsibility of managers? Four options will be discussed. (1) Market regulation, which binds the actions of managers. (2) Professionalization of management, which seeks for better information. (3) Moral management, which incorporates norms and values from outside the market. (4) Stakeholder management, which leaves room for the participation of stakeholders. These options can be schematized according to an internal-external axis and an objective-subjective axis. I will show that stakeholder management fits the best with the idea of corporate citizenship, but has serious risks of failing. (shrink)

The naturalistic fallacy is a source of much confusion. In what follows I will explain what G. E. Moore meant by the naturalistic fallacy, give modern day examples of it then mention some of the different types of views it has spawned. Finally, I will consider a few criticisms of it.

The topic of cruelty features regularly in discussions concerning animals’ moral status. Further, condemnation of cruelty to animals is virtually unanimous. As Regan points out, ‘[i]t would be difficult to find anyone who is in favour of cruelty.’ What is to count as cruelty is therefore important. My aim here is to gain a clearer understanding of one aspect of our moral landscape: cruelty to animals. I will start by analyzing the concept of cruelty in section II. In section III (...) I will examine some implications of this analysis. I will present two arguments for why we should reassess whether modern farming practices are cruel. First, farming practices have changed and our understanding of the concept of cruelty needs to change with them. Second, our application of the concept of cruelty is inconsistent: we would consider many routine practices involving farm animals to be cruel if they involved pets. This inconsistency presents a dilemma: either extending farming practices to pets would not be cruel, or continuing our current farming practices is cruel. In section IV I consider some objections. (shrink)

Descartes’s causal theory is often taken to announce modernity by radically breaking with the Aristotelian past. Specifically, Descartes is often taken to reject the full Aristotelian causal theory in favor of the efficient causes characteristic of mechanistic physics and the activity of minds. In this chapter, I argue against this view by showing that Descartes endorses an avowedly Aristotelian notion of formal causation. First, I articulate Cartesian formal causation in light of its Aristotelian background, and I show that Descartes endorses (...) what Francisco Suárez termed metaphysical formal causal explanation. Then, I argue against taking formal causation to be a peripheral explanatory notion for Descartes by showing it to be both well-attested textually and part and parcel of his Platonic intellectualism. I conclude by suggesting some further contexts in which this Cartesian notion of formal causation could be profitably wielded. (shrink)

Definition: considering human beings to be of central importance; the source of value.

It matters a great deal whether animals have moral status. If animals have moral status, it may be wrong for us to use them as we currently do – hunting, farming, eating, and experimenting on them. The argument from marginal cases provides us with a reason to think that some animals have moral status that is equal to that of “marginal” humans.

The article applauds the early Christians for their courage in embracing Greek, the lingua franca of the time. In this embrace they were not seduced by Greek philosophy. Rather, the early councils of the Church fashioned a theological vocabulary that expressed with remarkable fidelity the key concepts of the Christian message.

Originally published in 1979. Adultery is a dominant feature in chivalric literature; it becomes a major concern in Shakespeare's last plays; and it forms the central plot of novels from Anna Karenina to Couples. Tony Tanner proposes that transgressions of the marriage contract take on a special significance in the "bourgeois novels" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His interpretation begins with the general topic of adultery in literature and then zeroes in on three works—Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse, Goethe's (...) Die Wahlverwandtschaften, and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. His interpretation encompasses the role of women, the structure of the family, social mores, and the history of sexuality. (shrink)

Der Hallenser Theologe Klaus Tanner verortet die Theologie programmatisch im Kontext der Kulturwissenschaften. Christliche Theologie hat ein eigenstandiges Fundament in den Texten eines Grundbuches unserer Kultur: in der Bibel und ihrer breiten Rezeptions- und Wirkungsgeschichte. Die Wirkmachtigkeit christlichen Gedankengutes dokumentiert sich dabei immer auch als seine Transformation durch andere kulturelle Wirkgrossen. Exemplarisch zeigen das die in diesem interdisziplinaren Band versammelten Beitrage anhand des Liebesbegriffs. Das Spektrum der Untersuchungen reicht von exegetischen und theologiegeschichtlichen Darstellungen christlicher Liebestheologien uber Analysen zu nicht-christlichen (...) Leitvorstellungen von Liebe bis hin zu Beitragen institutioneller und diskursiver Einsatze des Liebesbegriffs. Auf diese Weise spannen die Autoren einen eindrucksvollen Bogen von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that neo-Hobbesian contractarianism cannot yield direct moral standing for marginal humans and animals. However, it has been argued that marginal humans and animals can have a form of direct moral standing under neo-Hobbesian contractarianism: secondary moral standing. I will argue that, even if such standing is direct, this account is unsatisfactory because it is counterintuitive and fragile.