Volume 20, Issue 3, March 2020, Page 21-24.

Effective corporate social responsibility policies are a requirement for today's companies. Policies have not only to be formulated, they also have to be delivered by corporate employees. This paper uses existing research findings to identify two types of factors that may impact on employee motivation and commitment to CSR ‘buy-in’. The first of these is contextual: employee attitudes and behaviours will be affected by organizational culture and climate, by whether CSR policies are couched in terms of compliance or in terms (...) of values, and by whether such policies are integrated into business processes or simply an ‘add-on’ that serves as window-dressing. The second set of factors is perceptual. Motivation and commitment will be affected by the extent to which they can align personal identity and image with that of the organization, by their perceptions of justice and fairness both in general and in terms of how CSR performance is rewarded, and by their impressions concerning the attitude of top management to CSR issues and performance. (shrink)

Can a business be said to demonstrate moral virtues, and does being virtuous mean that it is more likely to behave ethically?

Indexicality is a feature of predicates and predicate components (verbs, adjectives, adverbs and the like) as well as of referring expressions. With classic referring indexicals such as 'I' or 'that' a distinctive rule takes us from token and context to some item present in the content which is the semantic correlate of the token. Predicates and predicate components may function in an analogous fashion. For example 'thus' is an indexical adverb which latches onto some manner of performance present in its (...) context. 'John sang thus', said while indicating someone singing discordantly, claims that John sang discordantly. The phenomenon of predicatival indexicality is widespread in English and is expressed in a variety of idioms. Indexical predication plays important epistemological and psychological roles and the notion may have other interesting philosophical applications. (shrink)

This paper explores the type of stakeholder engagement currently being undertaken by many organisations as part of social and ethical accounting, auditing and reporting processes. Specifically, the paper seeks to determine the extent to which current corporate practice iteratively promotes stakeholder participation in collaboratively designing accountability programmes, or whether it merely is a new term for canvassing stakeholder opinions. Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation is used as a conceptual model for positioning contemporary methods of stakeholder dialogue. The findings from interviews (...) with representatives from twenty‐nine UK and transnational organisations actively engaged in stakeholder dialogue are presented. This paper concludes that contemporary organisations seem to be seeking to engage with stakeholders in partnerships, yet their attempts still fall short of what Arnstein called Citizen Control, the level of achievement that non‐governmental organisations would like stakeholder engagement to attain. (shrink)

We spend a lot of time thinking about other people: their motivations, what they are thinking, why they want particular things. Sometimes we are aware of it, but it often occurs without conscious thought, and we can respond appropriately to other people's thoughts in a diverse range of situations. The Social Mind: A Philosophical Introduction examines the cognitive capacities that facilitate this amazing ability. It explains and critiques key philosophical theories about how we think about other people's minds, measuring them (...) against empirical findings from neuroscience, anthropology, developmental psychology and cognitive ethology. Some of the fascinating questions addressed include: How do we think about other people's minds? Do we put ourselves in another's shoes to work out what they think? When do we need to think about another person's thoughts? What kinds of thoughts do we attribute to others? Are they propositional attitudes like beliefs and desires as analytic philosophers have often assumed, or could they be something else? What sorts of neural mechanisms underlie our ability to think about other people's thoughts? How is the ability to think about other minds different for individuals on the autism Spectrum? Is a preoccupation with other people's thoughts a Western phenomenon or is it found in all cultures? How do children learn to think about other minds? Can non-human animals think about other minds? These questions are applied to case studies throughout the book, including mirror neurons, recent research on infant social cognition, false belief tasks, and cross-cultural studies. Covering complex interdisciplinary debates in an accessible and clear way, with chapter summaries, annotated further reading, and a glossary, The Social Mind: A Philosophical Introduction is an ideal entry point into this fast-moving and exciting field. It is essential reading for students of philosophy of mind and psychology, and also of interest to those in related subjects such as cognitive science, social and developmental psychology, and anthropology. (shrink)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and John Dewey were both pragmatists who recognized the need to restructure the environment to bring about social progress. Gilman was even more of a pragmatist than Dewey, however, because she addressed problems he did not identify-much less confront. Her philosophy is in accord with the spirit of Dewey's work but in important ways, it is more consistent, more comprehensive and more radical than his instrumentalism.

ObjectiveTo examine measurement agreement between a vocabulary test that is administered in the standardized manner and a version that is administered with a brain-computer interface.MethodThe sample was comprised of 21 participants, ages 9–27, mean age 16.7 years, 61.9% male, including 10 with congenital spastic cerebral palsy, and 11 comparison peers. Participants completed both standard and BCI-facilitated alternate versions of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test - 4. The BCI-facilitated PPVT-4 uses items identical to the unmodified PPVT-4, but each quadrant forced-choice item (...) is presented on a computer screen for use with the BCI.ResultsMeasurement agreement between instruments was excellent, including an intra-class correlation coefficient of 0.98, and Bland-Altman plots and tests indicating adequate limits of agreement and no systematic test version bias. The mean standard score difference between test versions was 2.0 points.ConclusionThese results demonstrate that BCI-facilitated quadrant forced-choice vocabulary testing has the potential to measure aspects of language without requiring any overt physical or communicative response. Thus, it may be possible to identify the language capabilities and needs of many individuals who have not had access to standardized clinical and research instruments. (shrink)

Healthism and ableism intertwine through an imperative of normalcy and the ensuing devaluing of those who fail to meet societally dominant norms and expectations around “normal” health. This paper tracks the effect of that imperative of normalcy through current research into gut microbiome therapies, using therapies targeting fatness and autism as examples. The complexity of the gut microbiome ought to encourage us to rethink our conception of ourselves and our embeddedness in the world; instead, the microbiome is transformed into one (...) more tool for controlling unruly bodies and minds. (shrink)

Innovative surgery raises four kinds of ethical challenges: potential harms to patients; compromised informed consent; unfair allocation of healthcare resources; and conflicts of interest. Lack of adequate data on innovations and lack of regulatory oversight contribute to these ethical challenges. In this paper these issues and the extent to which problems may be resolved by better evidence-gathering and more comprehensive regulation are explored. It is suggested that some ethical issues will be more resistant to resolution than others, owing to special (...) features of both surgery and innovation. (shrink)

Studies on surrogate motherhood have mostly explored paid arrangements through the lens of a contract model, as clinical work or as a maternal identity-building project. Turning to the under-examined case of unpaid, so-called altruistic surrogate motherhood and based on an analysis of interviews with women who had been unpaid surrogate mothers in a full gestational surrogacy with a friend or relative in Canada, the United States or Australia, this article explores altruistic surrogate motherhood as relational work. It argues that this (...) form of surrogate motherhood within close interpersonal relations can be conceptualised through the relational work involved in hosting a child for the intended parents. The article explores how relational work in this context implies an embodied, asymmetrical and far-reaching sense of responsibility that surrogate mothers describe as characteristic of their surrogacy experience. In this way, the article sheds light on feminist concerns about surrogacy as an embodied and objectifying work of women while at the same time illuminating how surrogate mothers respond to the intended parents in light of their pre-surrogacy relationship, how meanings are negotiated by them and how relationships are managed during the pregnancy. (shrink)

Moorthy, R.S., De George, Richard T., Donaldson, Thomas, Ellos, William J., Solomon, Robert C. and Textor, Robert B., Uncompromising Integrity: Motorola’s Global Challenge.

Research illustrates that social movements can fuel new markets and that these markets can create social change, but the role of leaders in this process is less understood. This exploratory interview-based study of the localism movement contributes to such understanding. It articulates the relationship of social movement leaders and the legitimacy of their organizations to new market creation. Specifically, leaders in this study engaged in a dual role to legitimize their organizations and to legitimize the movement. At an organizational level, (...) leaders chose strategies that conformed to a conventional organizational model of the social movement organization as a business network, much like a local chamber of commerce. At a movement level, the SMO’s level of legitimacy influenced the leader’s choice of strategies to grow a “local” market. These strategies aimed, primarily, to shape consumer purchase behavior and, secondarily, to foster the development of producers’ skills, and only in a tertiary way, to alter the nature of exchange. Finally, this study’s findings suggest a tension between the dual roles that may ultimately challenge the efficacy of the movement. (shrink)

Prompted by the ever-increasing cesarean rate, this paper considers the interpretive disjunct between two significant strands of feminist analysis that have arisen in the last four decades as a consequence of the phenomenon of medicalized birth. In contrast to the dominant paradigm of bioethical “Principalism,” both modes of analysis, understood as “the critique of industrialized labor” and “the critique of idealized labor,” are attentive to the way in which social discourses inform bioethical deliberation and practice, but significantly diverge in the (...) nature of their accounts. The “industrialization critique” understands the culture of medical intervention to be impelled by an “obstetric desire” to appropriate women's reproductive potency, whereas the “idealization critique” relates new mothers’ “low childbirth satisfaction” to a pernicious normative ideal propagated by the natural childbirth movement. This paper will explore the anatomy of both critiques and interrogate their fidelity to the phenomenological insight of the body as chiasm between material and ideal. I will argue that while the insights of the idealization critique are well grounded, we must exercise caution about the critique's tendency to reductively understand the embodied experience of labor as entirely discursively produced, a gesture that risks re-performing the dematerialization of women often effected through obstetric intervention itself. (shrink)

“Gut issues” refers to any condition that affects our digestive systems and that causes pain or discomfort. The term points to the experience of our gut being an issue for us – interfering with our plans, undermining our bodily self-control, threatening our well-being. This paper aims to do three things: (1) to introduce and justify a disability theory approach to gut issues; (2) to use this lens to argue that the experience of gut issues has a social and relational dimension (...) that could be otherwise; and (3) to argue for a shared responsibility to ameliorate this dimension. (shrink)

Values -- Tolerance -- Tolerant people -- Being tolerant of family -- Being tolerant of friends -- Being tolerant of neighbours -- Ways to be tolerant -- Being aware of others -- Respecting different kinds of families -- Accepting other cultures -- Including others -- Learning from others -- Being patient -- Personal set of values.

This paper will examine the way in which premenstrual symptomatology has been represented and regulated by psychology and psychiatry. It questions the “truths” about women's premenstrual experiences that circulate in scientific discourse, namely the fictions framed as facts that serve to regulate femininity, reproduction, and what it is to be “woman.” Hegemonic truths that define Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) and its nosological predecessor Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS) are examined to illustrate how regimes of objectified knowledge and practices of “assemblage” come to (...) regulate individual women through a process of subjectification. Five interconnected “truths” are presented as objects of scrutiny: PMDD is a thing that can be objectively defined and measured; PMDD is a pathology to be eradicated; PMDD is caused and can be treated by one factor; PMDD is a bodily phenomenon; PMDD causes women's problems or symptoms. I examine the way in which these hegemonic truths function in framing the reproductive body as a cause of disorder or distress that leads women to interpret premenstrual experiences within a pathological framework deserving medical or psychological treatment. Finally, I offer an alternative framework drawing on Eastern models of selfhood that provides a more empowering model of women's premenstrual experiences. (shrink)

Susan Stebbing's Thinking to Some Purpose is analysed along the lines of contemporary efforts in critical thinking, and some of the problematized media material of her time. It is concluded that what Stebbing recommends is difficult to achieve, but worth the effort.Export citation.

ABSTRACT This paper offers an account of the early career of Martha Kneale, née Hurst, and of the five papers she published between 1934 and 1950. One on metaphysical and logical necessity, from 1938, is particularly interesting. In it she considers the metaphysics of time and offers an explanation of ‘the necessity of the past’, which has some resemblance to Kripke’s ideas about metaphysical necessities, in that it assigns an important role to experience in how we come to know them. (...) But Kneale’s view is very different from Kripke’s, depending not on doctrines about rigid designation but rather on recognition of the failure of the atomist/empiricist account of ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ concepts. That account cannot deal with such things as the relations of the determinates of a determinable like colour. A plausible corollary of this, which Kneale exploits, is that some of our experience reveals to us that there are phenomena which are intrinsically complex in having multiple distinguishable aspects, but where those aspects are inseparable. Other of the papers show Kneale to have been pursuing interesting lines of thought about McTaggart’s argument against the reality of time and on the mind-body problem. (shrink)

John Henry Newman had a fascination with the angels, as evidenced by three of his published poems, a passage devoted to angels in his Apologia pro Vita Sua, as well as sermons on the angels. Surprisingly, Newman’s interest in angels has not attracted much scholarly attention. After examining some of Newman’s writings that touch upon angels, this essay suggests that Newman’s Romantic and Evangelical background prepared him for his reading of the Fathers in 1828, which in turn influenced his consideration (...) of the significance of angels in the spiritual life. (shrink)

: This response to the preceding five articles highlights the stubborn persistence of the philosophical perplexities surrounding commodification in the realm of medicine and biotechnology.

Community care for frail elderly people rests heavily on the work of low-status, paraprofessional home care workers. Home care workers describe their work as highly personalized caring labor that often seeps out of its formal boundaries into informal, unpaid activities. Although these activities are valued by workers, their supervisors, elderly clients, and family members, they represent uncompensated and exploited labor. Cost-cutting trends in home care management that seek to depersonalize home care labor are likely to increase its exploitative potential for (...) paid care workers and, simultaneously, to disadvantage and jeopardize elderly home care clients and their unpaid family caregivers. (shrink)

This book demonstrates how Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the continuity of inner and psychological life (interiority) and the material world (exteriority) ...

Indexical predication is possible as well as the more familiar indexical reference. ‘My curtains are coloured thus’ describes my curtains. The indexical predicate expression it contains stands to possible non‐indexical replacements as a referring indexical does to possible non‐indexical replacements , in that it calls upon the context of utterance to fix its semantic contribution to the whole. Indexical predication is the natural resource to call upon in talk about skilful human performances, where we exhibit considerable know‐how but little explicit (...) know‐that. Speech is among such performances. Both direct and indirect speech reports may be illuminated by seeing them in the light of this thought. A corollary of the approach is that the prospects of providing a formal semantic treatment of indirect speech do not look good. (shrink)

We explore the impact of board resources arising from diverse board members on the achievement of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. Employing resource dependence theory as our frame and drawing on qualitative data from 41 interviews with board directors of publicly traded and privately held companies in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), we identify three key mechanisms underpinning the achievement of ESG goals, namely, the leveraging of particular connections, the deployment of different resources, and the harnessing of a range (...) of diversity types. We find that the use of social resources is often related to environmental concerns and occasionally social goals, but rarely governance issues. We also find that financial motivations often drive environmental issues, while many of the social resources that added value occurred in the public sector. Importantly, the combining of both skill and social resources, rather than relying on each alone, was seen to increase the likelihood of achieving ESG goals. Our findings also point to the importance of board diversity in accomplishing the board's ESG goals, most especially functional diversity. We propose that such functional diversity, along with resources in the form of social resources and skills, needs to feature more prominently in order to improve ESG performance and outcomes. We highlight the implications of our work, especially regarding the establishment of board diversity policies beyond gender alone. (shrink)

The SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused social and economic devastation. As the milestone of two years of ‘living with the virus’ approaches, governments and businesses are attempting to develop means of reopening society whilst still protecting public health. However, developing interventions – particularly technological interventions – that find a safe, socially acceptable, and ethically justifiable balance between these two seemingly opposing demands is extremely challenging. There is no one right solution, but the current most popular ‘solution’ is the so-called ‘COVID-19 (...) Vaccine Passport’ (also known as COVID-19 passes or certificates), the use of which may be supported by both human rights and international public health law if they are designed and implemented appropriately. (We use the term ‘Vaccine Passport’ because it has been adopted by the popular press. Though it has been used in many ways, here we use it generically to refer to a document that certifies that an individual has been vaccinated against COVID-19 and on that basis grants the bearer more liberties than to those who have not been vaccinated. Later, we will discuss why it is necessary to move beyond considering only vaccinations, which informs our preferred term of ‘COVID-19 Status Pass’.) We set out to answer the following questions: how should governments and businesses assess the risks in light of human rights, public health ethics, and digital ethics concerns which emerge from developing and deploying COVID-19 Vaccine Passports? What design decisions should businesses make when developing COVID-19 Vaccine Passports to help ensure they respect human rights, and both public health and digital ethics? Do the implications for human rights, public health, and digital ethics vary depending on where and when COVID-19 Vaccine Passports are used? What are the rights and powers of the individual to object to or seek remedy for the use of COVID-19 Vaccine Passports? How can the risks of inequalities and social division derived from the deployment of COVID-19 Vaccine Passports be avoided or mitigated? We conducted a literature review and documentary analysis, supplementing our findings with news articles where appropriate. The following pages report our results, concluding with a series of actionable recommendations for businesses, national governments, and supranational organisations. (shrink)

The argument that a holistic analysis of Dewey's work, drawing not only on the major portions subject to extensive commentary (such as Experience and Nature) but also on his aesthetics, provides fuel for feminist theorizing is sustained by advertence to the standard commentary and also to new work in aesthetic feminism itself. Sleeper, Rorty, Hickman and Russell are cited, and the recent resurgence of interest in developing the intersection between analytic aesthetics and feminist aesthetics is alluded to. It is concluded (...) that the enterprising feminist theorist may suffer from an embarrassment of riches in attempting to approach Dewey but that such an approach is well worth the effort. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss the case of Michael Johnson, an African-American man who sought treatment for respiratory distress due to COVID-19, but who was adamant that he did not want to be intubated due to his belief that ventilators directly cause death. This case prompted reflection about the ways in which a false belief can create uncertainty and complexity for clinicians who are responsible for evaluating decision-making capacity (DMC). In our analysis, we consider the extent to which Mr. Johnson (...) demonstrated capacity according to each of Appelbaum’s criteria. Although it was fairly clear that Mr. Johnson lacked DMC on the basis of both understanding and appreciation, we found ourselves reflecting upon the false belief that seemed to motivate his refusal. This led us to further consider the ways in which our current social and political environment can complicate evaluations of patients’ preferences and reasons for declining life-sustaining interventions. In particular, we consider the impact of the role of misinformation and systemic racism in preparing the grounds for false beliefs. (shrink)

People with gut issues are often constrained in the foods they are able to eat. The choices they are able to make about food, however, are shaped not merely by specific medical and dietary needs but also by social, relational, and environmental factors such as the presence of trusted and supportive others who take their needs seriously. Drawing on work in disability theory and relational autonomy, as well as interviews undertaken in summer 2019, the paper explores the ways that choices (...) are enabled or undermined, and argues that these should be taken into account in work on the ethics and politics of food. (shrink)

Lines of argument to support the notion that global bioethics can use work from feminist epistemology are set out, and much of the support for such contentions comes from specific cases of ethical issues in indigenous cultures. Theorists such as Kuhse, Arizpe, Egnor and Bumiller are cited, and it is concluded that local feminist epistemologies often conflict with standard ethical views, but that the failure to incorporate feminist thought undercuts hopes to establish a viable bioethics on an international scale.

I argue that the importance of reference for scientific explanation has been overlooked, and that actual referential stability itself is more important in the success of scientific theories than many apparently believe. Citing the work of Van Fraassen and Lipton, I delineate cases of referential failure, both intratheoretically and intertheoretically, and remind us of the role played by reference in theories both realist and non‐realist. I conclude that work on such areas as contrastive explanation cannot move forward without a better (...) account of reference, and cite previously published material on the relationship between reference and epistemic access. (shrink)