Researchers and managers alike are becoming increasingly interested in the topic of unethical consumer behavior. Where most studies view unethical behavior as something that is identifiable per se, the authors of the present article believe that it only exists because it has been constructed by people operating within a specific context. Hence the efforts made by this paper to explore, at the level of one specific organization, how interactions between employees and consumers might lead to the construct of unethical consumers. (...) Based on a case study of France’s AMDM—a mutual insurance company set up to serve a client base comprising motorcyclists—the paper addresses how one group of consumers ends up being categorized as unethical by revealing the existence of a sensemaking process within the target organization. This process develops in three main phases: the nurturing of a shared ethos; the protection of employees’ recognized status; and the demonization of any group of consumers threatening this status. Managers incorporating this sensemaking process can avoid or mitigate the negative effects befalling organizations when these kinds of unethical consumer behavior are constructed. (shrink)

Depuis dix ans et avec le mouvement big data, l’intelligence artificielle a le vent en poupe. Les acteurs politiques et économiques retrouvent ainsi un intérêt à promouvoir activement l’intelligence artificielle dans le même temps que les chercheurs issus de tous les horizons scientifiques orientent de plus en plus leurs travaux vers cet objet d’étude qui, bien souvent et à tort, leur apparaît nouveau. Cet engagement collectif est nécessaire contenu de l’immensité des enjeux humains, sociaux et économiques qui sont associés au (...) développement de l’intelligence artificielle. Le problème est qu’il s’accompagne d’un tapage médiatique qui tend à embrouiller les débats et les travaux. Un exemple frappant est le fait qu’il existe aujourd’hui plusieurs spécialistes renommés qui expriment l’idée que l’intelligence artificielle n’existe pas! De telle sorte que, même dans la communauté scientifique, il est parfois difficile d’identifier ce qu’est l’intelligence artificielle. Cet article vise à lever le voile sur cette obscurité. (shrink)

Against the well-known objection that in the history of science there are many theories that are successful but false, Psillos offers a three-pronged defense of scientific realism as the best explanation for the success of science. Focusing on these, I criticize Psillos’ defense, arguing that each prong is weakened when we recognize that according to realist rebuttals of the underdetermination argument and versions of empiricism, realists are committed to accounting for the explanatory success of theories, not their mere empirical adequacy (...) or instrumental reliability. I conclude by indicating how ‘explanationist’ realism might be recast to accommodate my arguments. (shrink)

Defence cases with an escalatory structure, in which the levels of violence between aggressor and defender start out as minor and then become major, even lethal, raise sharp problems for defence theory, and for our understanding of the conditions of defence: proportionality, necessity, and imminence. It is argued here that defenders are not morally required to withdraw from participation in these cases, and that defensive escalations do not offend against any of the conditions of defence, on an adequate understanding of (...) them. No plausible interpretation of proportionality or necessity excludes defensive permissions in escalatory cases. Moreover, the structure of escalatory defensive cases also sheds useful light on permissible responses to conditional deadly threats. This is because we can analyse conditional deadly threats as disguised cases of escalation. Because defensive resistance is permissible in escalatory cases, it is also permissible in cases involving conditional deadly threats. (shrink)

Normative error theory is thought by some to be unbelievable because they suppose the incompatibility of believing a proposition at the same time as believing that one has no normative reason to believe it—which believing in normative error theory would seem to involve. In this article, I argue that normative holism is believable and that a normative holist will believe that the truth of a proposition does not invariably generate a normative reason to believe it. I outline five different scenarios (...) in which this is believably the case. I then show how each example can be used to generate a counterexample to the incompatibility claim. I conclude that believing a proposition is compatible with believing there is no reason to believe it and that as such normative error theory has not yet been shown to be unbelievable. (shrink)

A. Two conceptions of moral legitimacy Socialism, understood as the rejection of markets based on private property in favor of comprehensive centralized economic planning, is no longer a serious political option. If the core of capitalism is the organization of the economy primarily through market competition based on private property, then capitalism has certainly defeated socialism. Markets have been accepted—and central planning abandoned—throughout most of the “third world” and the formerly Communist states. In the advanced industrial states of the West, (...) Labor and “democratic socialist” parties have rejected socialism, having deregulated markets and privatized industries, utilities, and transport. The United Kingdom Labour Party’s 1945 manifesto declared it to be a “Socialist Party, and proud of it. Its ultimate aim is the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain.”1 Today it insists that markets are a given. (shrink)

In the few decades a new conception of liberalism has arisen—the “public reason view” — which developed out of contractualist approaches to justifying liberalism. The social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau all stressed that the justification of the state depended on showing that everyone would, in some way, consent to it. By relying on consent, social contract theory seemed to suppose a voluntarist conception of political justice: what is just depends on what people choose to agree to — (...) what they will. As Hume famously pointed out, such accounts seem to imply that ultimately political justice derives from promissory obligations, which the social contract theory leaves unexplained.1 Only in Kant, I think, does it become clear that consent is not fundamental to a social contract view: we have a duty to agree to act according to the idea of the “original contract.”2 Rawls’s revival of social contract theory in A Theory of Justice also made no important appeal to consent, though the apparatus of an “original agreement” of sorts persisted. The aim of the original position, Rawls announced, is to settle “the question of justification…by working out a problem of deliberation.”3 As the question of public justification takes center stage (we might say as contractualist liberalism becomes justificatory liberalism), it becomes clear that posing the problem of justification in terms of a deliberative or a bargaining problem is simply a heuristic: the real issue.. (shrink)

What is it to be seen (naked) by one's cat? In “L'animal que donc je suis” (2006), the first of several lectures that he presented at a conference on the “autobiographical animal,” Jacques Derrida tells of his discomfort when, emerging from his shower one day, he found himself being looked at by his cat. Th experience leads him, by way of reflections on the question of the animal, to what is arguably the question of his philosophy: Who am I? It (...) is not so much that Derrida wants to answer this question as to be free of it. His task here is to determine the sense of it— where it leads, for example, when it comes to the nature of the diff erence between himself and his cat. Unlike animal rights activists (and unlike philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Cora Diamond, who have recently addressed this issue), Derrida does not want to erase this difference but wants to multiply it in order (among other things) to affirm the absolute alterity or singularity of his cat, which cannot be subsumed by any category (such as the animal). His cat is an Other in a way that no human being (supposing there to be such a thing, which Derrida is not prepared to grant) could ever be. And here is where “the question who?” leads as well, namely, to a path of escape from absorption into any identity-machine. As Derrida puts it in A Taste for the Secret: Who am I when I am not one of you? In a hospitable world one would be free not to answer. (shrink)

The thesis of this essay is that social conventions of the kind Lewis modeled are generated and maintained by a form of practical reasoning which is essentially common. This thesis is defended indirectly by arguing for an interpretation of the role of salience in Lewis’s account of conventions. The remarkable ability of people to identify salient options and appreciate their practical significance in contexts of social interaction, it is argued, is best explained in terms of their exercise of what I (...) call “salience reasoning,” a form of common practical reasoning. The more widely accepted understanding of salience competence, the “natural salience” understanding, fails as an interpretation of the notion at work in Lewis and Schelling (on whom Lewis relied) and is inadequate as an explanation of salience competence. (shrink)

In general, offers a good discussion of Dworkin's theory of interpretation. Postema is critically concerned with whether Dworkin commits himself to individualistic and privatistic sense of interpretation and how Dworkin articulates the logical independency of pre-interpretive paradigm instances or social facts which form the object of interpretation and the end which is interpretively posited in the act of interpretation. Criticisms, for the most part, appear to be compatible with Dworkin's overall theory and may simply be additional explication of the character (...) of interpretation. "There is nothing in Dworkin's meta-theory of interpretation of social practices that requires attention to the interpretive activities of fellow participants. Herein lies the strong "protestantism" of Dworkin's theory. Not only is each participant encouraged to take up the interpretive enterprise...but each individual participant also has access to the truth, as it were, about what the practice is and requires, though private interpretation of the practice-text. While Dworkin seems to recognize that the practice is common, he counsels participants to live as if each had a private understanding of his own." "It is problematic because it makes interpretation of social practices insufficiently practical, insufficiently intersubjective, and thus insufficiently political." Notes that the interpretive attitude when acting in a practice is relatively rare, usually becoming part of a practice is more like learning a discipline or technique. "[I]t may not be possible intelligibly to separate that point from the activies and rules in which it is expressed. The same meaning may, conceivably, be expressed in some other way, but this does not imply that the meaning is logically independent of the medium of expression." "That is, the behavior is logically separable from its interpretation only on pain of denying that the practice is common activity yielding common principles." "Often an agent may only come to understand his actions long after he has performed them, or may later come to see his actions in a very different light...First, on this view meaningful action is a primitive. Action is expressive of its meaning or purpose, but not resolvable into distinct behavior and purpose. But, since this purpose or meaning may not be fully or clearly articulated, interpretation can be seen as the activity of re-formulating and articulating it. Second, the 'meaning' of an action cannot be regarded as a private matter for the agent alone.". (shrink)

The basic concept of Bentham's moral and political philosophy was public utility. He linked it directly with the concept of the universal interest, which comprises a distinctive partnership of the interests of all members of the community. The ultimate end of government and aim of all of morality is ‘the advancement of the universal interest’. This essay articulates the structure of Bentham's notion of universal interest and locates it in his theory of value.

First published in 2012, Doing Philosophy presents the basics of how 'to do' philosophy -- what philosophy is, how we can think, the nature of logic, some special terms -- in a straightforward and easy to understand style. Then, using questions and exercises as well as everyday examples, the author takes the reader on a wide-ranging tour of key philosophical topics which, as well as the 'standard fare' of logic, epistemology, mind, God etc., also includes ethical, social, scientific, cultural and (...) human issues such as time, cosmology, war, animal rights, euthanasia, abortion, genetics, evolution, and the meaning of life. The author's emphasis throughout is that philosophy is accessible to anyone keen enough to try and do it and that, as a subject, philosophy is practical, fascinating and exciting. By encouraging independent critical thinking and being succinct yet informative, the book involves the reader with the history, the breadth of subject matter, the skills of philosophising and the benefits that philosophy can offer to the enquiring individual. The book accesses major philosophical topics briefly, breaking them down into convenient points, with challenging questions throughout and exercise questions at the end of each chapter, whilst introducing major thinkers and their ideas. There is an extensive further reading list to help those who wish to take this absorbing subject further. (shrink)

Nurses are often caught in the middle of what appear to be intractable moral conflicts. For such times, the function and limits of moral compromise need to be explored. Compromise is compatible with moral integrity if a number of conditions are met. Among these are the sharing of a moral language, mutual respect on the part of those who differ, acknowledgement of factual and moral complexities, and recognition of limits to compromise. Nurses are in a position uniquely suited to leadership (...) in fostering an environment that makes compromise with integrity possible. Keywords: compromise, integrity, nursing ethics CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The ethical choices faced by engineers today are increasingly complex. Competing and conflicting ethical demands from clients, communities, employees, and personal objectives combine to suggest that engineers employ ethical approaches that are adaptive yet grounded in three concrete professional circumstances: first, that engineers apply unique professional skills in the service of a client, subject to protecting the public interest; second, that engineers advance the state of knowledge of their professional field through reflection, research, and sharing experience in journals and conferences, (...) and third, that they develop new professionals by active mentoring. This paper examines five features of American pragmatism and suggests that its emphasis on specific, context-based ethical decision making can assist engineers in a postmodern setting. In particular, it considers the venues of interpersonal ethical choices, institutional ethical conflicts, and social choices that have ethical components. Pragmatism suggests that in such a complex ethical climate, there is a need for the co-evolution of judgment and action, for individual reflective judgment in particular situations, and for ceasing to search for a single, immutable principle for ethical choice. (shrink)

Mandeville writes that it was said of Montaigne “that he was pretty well vers’d in the Defects of Man-kind, but unacquainted with the Excellencies of human Nature,” adding, “If I fare no worse, I shall think my self well used.” Mandeville transformed Montaigne’s suggestion into a methodology for his systematic attempt to “anatomize the invisible Parts of Man”. His tale of “the grumbling hive,” and his extensive commentary on it, were designed to demonstrate that “if Mankind could be cured of (...) the Failings they are Naturally guilty of, they would cease to be capable of being rais’d into such vast, potent and polite Societies, as they have been”. (shrink)

Emotion regulation choices are known to be profoundly consequential across affective, cognitive, and social domains. Prior studies have identified two important external factors of emotion regulati...

In his Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, T. H. Green characterizes a right as ‘a power claimed and recognized as contributory to a common good’ (LPPO §99). Scholars such as Rex Martin have noted that Green’s characterization of a right has multiple elements: it includes social recognition and the common good,1 as well as the idea of a power. More formally, it seems that Green wants to say that R is a right if and only if R is (...) (i) a power that is (ii) recognized by some others or by society as (iii) contributing to a common good. Much of the scholarship on Green has been devoted to explicating and defending this third feature, which grounds rights on Green’s core idea of a common good.2 In this chapter I shall stress claim (ii) —the recognition thesis —though we shall see that pursuing claim (ii) will enlighten us as to why Green links the recognition thesis to the common good claim, (iii). And claim (i), I shall argue, reinforces the plausibility of the recognition thesis. So.. (shrink)

A broad, though not unanimous, consensus among commentators is that the later Wittgenstein subscribes to a redundancy conception of truth. I reject that interpretation. No doubt much depends on what is meant by a redundancy theory. But once even mildly plausible versions of that view are isolated a review of the relevant texts shows that the evidence for that interpretation collapses. Moreover, the redundancy interpretation is at odds with guiding prescriptions in the post‐1932 corpus. Wittgenstein doesn’t hold that truth can (...) be defined or characterized thinly, as redundancy theorists propose, but that it isn’t susceptible to any such generic treatment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Metamorphosis of Language in Apuleius: A Study of Allusion in the NovelGerald SandyEllen D. Finkelpearl. Metamorphosis of Language in Apuleius: A Study of Allusion in the Novel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. xii 1 241 pp. Cloth, $42.50.At first glance the use of the word “allusion” in the subtitle of this book suggests an old-fashioned approach to literary analysis. Finkelpearl has, however, given a lot of (...) thought to her choice of terms. She acknowledges the equivocalness of allusions but prefers to use this word for the process of incorporating material from earlier writers rather than “reference” or “intertextuality.” In spite of her somewhat informal description of the process of allusion (“recalling, modifying, transforming, and playing around with passages”), she has made a conscientious effort to circumvent the “fuzziness and inexactitude” of identifying allusions by making vigorous use of TLL and other traditional philological aids in order to isolate words, phrases, and lexical combinations that are unique to Apuleius and his putative sources. She has also deliberately avoided applying a single theoretical model, because “Apuleius draws on a wide variety of genres from different time periods,... use[s] his sources differently at different times [and]... often maintains an ambiguous stance—between rejection and incorporation, homage and polemic—even within single allusions” (24). This “ambiguous stance” is in fact central to the thesis that Finkelpearl consistently develops in her book: In the Metamorphoses, “allusion provides a medium [End Page 471] for exploration of the fit between the novel and the genres it contains and helps the novel toward a definition of its genre” (27). She emphasizes the ambiguity of her subject from the beginning to the end of her book, stating in chapter 1 that her aim is “to examine the multiplicity of interactions between the Apuleian text and its forebears, with a vigilant consciousness of the novel’s various uncertainties” (31) and concluding that she has focused on the tensions caused by situating “an uncertain genre” within a defined literary tradition.There is no uncertainty about the structure of the book. Each of the eight chapters begins with a survey of relevant scholarship and a declaration of Finkelpearl’s place within, or outside of, the range of summarized views. The sequence of chapters also unfolds logically. After surveying in chapter 1 (“Background and Method”) the various scholarly procedures that have been used to characterize allusions, she progresses from the seemingly most simple (parody) to the most complex practices of allusion. One of the strongest features of the book is that she manages to uncover complex patterns of allusion in passages that other scholars have been content to label parodies. Good examples of this resourcefulness occur in Finkelpearl’s examination of Apuleius’ use of Sallust, one of the canonical Latin archaic models during the second half of the second century. At 1.16.2–3 the “low-life character” Aristomenes makes an unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide by hanging himself with a rope attached to his bed. He addresses the bed in the words spoken by Adherbal over the corpse of his brother Hiempsal (BJ 14.22), substituting, however, grabattule for frater. Other scholars have commented on the obvious disparity between the dignified poignancy of the passage in Sallust and the low-life melodrama of the Apuleian revamping of it. Finkelpearl explains that “the choice of reference has relevance beyond its comic effect” (51), for Aristomenes’ words are “motivated by the questions posed... [by Adherbal] about life and death in the face of fratricide and injustice.” As she puts it, “Apuleius never merely defaces or satirizes; examination of his text reveals a complex thematic engagement with his sources.”In chapter 3 (“Reading Isolated Allusions”) Finkelpearl also manages to find overarching resonance in seemingly isolated pastiches. Others, including me, have perhaps been too quick to conclude that Lucius’ prolonged praise of the maidservant Fotis’ hair in book 2 of the novel is an empty piece of the type of rhetorical tour de force that characterizes the Second Sophistic. Finkelpearl argues, however, that hairstyle and other styles of appearance and dress can serve in the Augustan poets as emblems of literary doctrine and that Apuleius... (shrink)

As a rule, Hayek has not been treated kindly by scholars. One would expect that a political theorist and economist of his stature would be charitably, if not sympathetically, read by commentators; instead, Hayek often elicits harsh dismissals. This is especially true of his fundamental ideas about the evolution of society and reason. A reader will find influential discussions in which his analysis is described as “dogmatic,” “unsophisticated,” and “crude.” In this chapter I propose to take a fresh start, sketching (...) a sympathetic interpretation of Hayek’s accounts of social evolution and mind as fundamental to his thinking. My basic claim is that Hayek’s views on social evolution and reason are not only intimately bound together, but they also depend on his analyses of complex orders, scientific explanations of such orders, and the place of rules in complex orders. Because so few commentators recognize that his claims about evolution are embedded in a system of ideas,1 most misunderstand him. (shrink)

Targeted killing is a subspecies of assassination, deployed against irregular combatants such as terrorists. The justification for targeted killing bypasses the usual ‘war paradigm’ and ‘criminal enforcement paradigm’, and is thus unusual. There are various ways of securing such a justification, but also a number of dangers attending these arguments.

Most prominent accounts of autonomy are active accounts, which means they hold that an agent can be autonomous with respect to a given action only if that agent has appropriately sanctioned that action. Active accounts, however, are vulnerable to the regress problem, since it seems that the required sanctioning actions are themselves just actions that must be sanctioned. Passive accounts hope to avoid the regress problem by eschewing the notion that autonomous action requires agential sanction, but face in its place (...) what I call the incompleteness problem for passive accounts. Here, I evaluate one passive account, recently defended by Sarah Buss, and argue that it can avoid the incompleteness problem only if it is supplemented by a satisfactory account of the development of autonomy. I then suggest that one development account, offered by Ishtiyaque Haji and Stefaan Cuypers, is an especially good supplement. My conclusion is that Buss’s account, supplemented in the way I suggest, can avoid the incompleteness problem. (shrink)

Is 'vague' vague? Is the meaning of 'true' vague? Is higher-order vagueness unavoidable? Is it possible to say precisely what it is to say something precisely? These questions, deeply interrelated and of fundamental importance to logic and semantics, have been addressed recently by Achille Varzi in articles focused on an ingenius attempt by Roy Sorensen ("An Argument for the Vagueness of 'Vague'") to demonstrate that 'vague' is vague.

Consider a stylized contrast between medical and business ethics. Both fields of applied ethics focus on a profession whose activities are basic to human welfare. Both enquire into obligations of professionals, and the relations between goals intrinsic to the profession and ethical duties to others and to the society. I am struck, however, by a fundamental difference: whereas medical ethics takes place against a background of almost universal consensus that the practice of medicine is admirable and morally praiseworthy, the business (...) profession is embedded within the framework of firms in a capitalist market economy, and for the last century and a half there has been sustained debate about the moral and economic justifiability of such an economy. To be sure, even under socialism there might be an “ethics of socialist managers,” and there would be some overlap between such an ethic and contemporary business ethics. Nevertheless, many of the characteristic problems of business ethics — e.g., what are the obligations of a corporation to its shareholders? — arise only in the context of a private property-based market economy. This raises a deep problem for business ethics: can one develop an account of ethical practices for an activity (i.e., business) while ignoring that the context in which this activity occurs (i.e., capitalism) is morally controversial? It is as if the work in medical ethics proceeded in the midst of widespread disagreement whether medicine was a good thing. Another way of thinking about the problem is: if one teaches business ethics, does this commit you to accepting that business can be ethical? And doesn’t this commit you to accepting that capitalism is justifiable?1 I suspect that this is a serious problem for many teachers of business ethics. Many were trained in academic philosophy, and within academic philosophy there are many who think — or at least suspect — that capitalism is basically unjust, or perhaps that only a greatly modified capitalism would be acceptable.. (shrink)