. Gender is a social construct. Technically, it is a grammatical structuring category that may refer to sex, as is typical of Indo‐European languages, or to another set of features such as animate versus inanimate, as is typical of Algonkian languages. Gender in language forces speakers of the language to be continually conscious of application of the category, and they tend to project the categorization into their experience of the world and collocate observations under these broad categories. Western science has (...) been developed by speakers of Indo‐European languages employing male/female genders, and in a cultural tradition that at least since the time of Classical Greece has collocated male with active, creative, rational, and public /dominant , and female with passive, irrational/emotional, and private /subordinate. Religion and science‐organons for rendering existential experience intelligible‐have always been used by the dominant class as instruments of power, and therefore in Western cultures have been entangled with legitimization of a congeries of concepts collocated with male gender. This paper illustrates the social construction of this congeries by contrasting it with non‐Western usages and valuations. (shrink)

This volume brings together a range of practical and theoretical perspectives on responsibility in the context of refugee and migrant integration. Addressing one of the major challenges of our time, a diverse group of authors shares insights from history, philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, and from personal experience. The book expands our understanding of the complex challenges and opportunities that are associated with migration and integration, and highlights the important role that individuals can and should play in the process.

This book provides a fresh and bold look at how archaeologists and heritage managers may enhance their capacity to interpret and understand material culture and heritage values. Drawing on the founding principles of anthropology, Archaeologies of Listening demonstrates the value of cultural apprenticeship, an almost forgotten part of archaeological practice.

This 2005 volume brings together twelve papers by many of the most prominent applied general equilibrium modelers honoring Herbert Scarf, the father of equilibrium computation in economics. It deals with developments in applied general equilibrium, a field which has broadened greatly since the 1980s. The contributors discuss some traditional as well as some modern topics in the field, including non-convexities in economy-wide models, tax policy, developmental modeling and energy modeling. The book also covers a range of distinct approaches, conceptual issues (...) and computational algorithms, such as calibration and areas of application such as macroeconomics of real business cycles and finance. An introductory chapter written by the editors maps out issues and scenarios for the future evolution of applied general equilibrium. (shrink)

Anthropological analysis of religion, following Bronislaw Mahowski, is founded in empirical observational data gained at least in part by participant observation. Malinowski described religion as a “sociological charter” which is a “retrospective moral pattern of behavior,” constructed as a myth after the fact of behavior. Anthony F. C. Wallace's revitalization model provides the mechanism through which the Malinowskian charter is developed. Jack Wilson's Ghost Dance religion is briefly described as an example of a revitalization movement, and it is suggested that (...) both contemporary peace movements and militant Christian movements are revitalization movements. (shrink)

Catholicism's precarious position in twentieth-century Scotland was in part a reflection of continued anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiments, but it was also the result of new political doctrines, growing worker movements and the introduction of complete female suffrage. These challenges were met, in part, by Margaret Sinclair, in religion Sister Mary Francis of the Five Wounds. The cause for her beatification and canonization was unofficially launched in 1926 and met with a groundswell of support, extending beyond Scotland to Europe and North (...) America as the working-classes embraced her as one of their own. Not only was she declared `Angel of the Factory', thereby extending the Church's influence to the factory floor, but her image was grafted to that of the nation as `Scotland's Little Flower'. She was to symbolize feminine piety, the working-class struggle and the epitome of Scottish Catholicism. (shrink)

Ludwik Fleck, Edmund Husserl : on the historicity of scientific knowledge -- Gaston Bachelard : the concept of "phenomenotechnique" -- Georges Canguilhem : epistemological history -- Pisum : Carl Correns's experiments on Xenia, 1896-99 -- Eudorina : Max Hartmann's experiments on biological regulation in protozoa, 1914-21 -- Ephestia : Alfred Kähn's experimental design for a developmental physiological -- Genetics, 1924-45 -- Tobacco mosaic virus : virus research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes for Biochemistry and Biology, 1937-45 -- The concept of (...) the gene : molecular biological perspectives -- The liquid scintillation counter : traces of radioactivity -- The concept of information : the writings of François Jacob -- Intersections -- Preparations -- The economy of the scribble. (shrink)

This volume outlines a model of language that can be characterized as functionalist, usage-based, dynamic, and complex-adaptive. The core idea is that linguistic structure is not stable and uniform, but continually refreshed by the interaction between three components: usage, the communicative activities of speakers; conventionalization, the social processes triggered by these activities and feeding back into them; and entrenchment, the individual cognitive processes that are also linked to these activities in a feedback loop. Hans-Joerg Schmid explains how this multiple feedback (...) system works by extending his Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model, showing how the linguistic system is created, sustained, and continually adapted by the ongoing interaction between usage, conventionalization, and entrenchment. Fulfilling the promise of usage-based accounts, the model explains how exactly usage is transformed into collective and individual grammar and how these two grammars in turn feed back into usage.0The book is exceptionally broad in scope, with insights from a wide range of linguistic subdisciplines. It provides a coherent account of the role of multiple factors that influence language structure, variation, and change, including frequency, economy, identity, multilingualism, and language contact. (shrink)

Autism research is increasingly moving to a view centred around sensorimotor atypicalities instead of traditional, ethically problematical, views predicated on social-cognitive deficits. We explore how an enactivist approach to autism illuminates how social differences, stereotypically associated with autism, arise from such sensorimotor atypicalities. Indeed, in a state space description, this can be taken as a skewing of sensorimotor variables that influences social interaction and so also enculturation and habituation. We argue that this construal leads to autism being treated on a (...) par with other sensorimotor atypicalities such as blindness or atypical height. This leads to our conclusion that, insofar there is an ethical call to inclusion in our public sphere regardless of contingent bodily difference, an enactivist take on autism naturally leads to extending such inclusion to autism. Moreover, our analysis suggests a concrete way forward to achieve inclusion of autistics: by being more attentive to autistic sensorimotor specifics. (shrink)

We propose that doping be legalized under medical supervision. First, we discuss two motivations for allowing medically supervised doping. We reject the ‘compromised choice/harm minimization’ motivation as unlikely to win the support of athletes. We agree that it could lead to an arms race. Instead, we favor full acceptance of doping under medical supervision and answer Reid’s spirit of sport objection to medical manipulation. After presenting a set of guiding principles, we use them to answer the arms race objection and (...) rebut one of the most prominent objections in the literature about the safety of medically supervised doping, the game-theoretic objection. (shrink)

The issue of management’s relations to the environment has received a significant amount of attention in the literature on corporate social responsibility. Yet the influence of religion on managers’ environmental decisions has until now remained unexamined despite its known importance. In this article, we examine the empirical association between religion—primarily Christianity—and the environmental practices a firm’s management undertakes by investigating their OLS, principal component, simultaneous, and endogenous effects. Employing a large and extensive U.S. sample, we find a negative association between (...) the environmental practices initiated by a firm’s managers and the religiosity of the surrounding community, after controlling for various firm and demographic characteristics. In addition, after mitigating endogeneity with the dynamic system generalized method of moment, we still find an inverse association between religiosity and environmental-friendly decisions of management. We interpret these results as providing some support for the “dominion hypothesis” that claims Christian beliefs discourage environmental concern, but not for the “stewardship hypothesis” that implies that Christianity encourages people to “exercise a responsible stewardship over nature.” Nevertheless, additional analysis shows Christian groups differ significantly in how each influences managers’ environmental decisions. (shrink)

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from (...) social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar was found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-negligible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic. (shrink)

The importance of relationality in ethical leadership has been the focus of recent attention in business ethics scholarship. However, this relational component has not been sufficiently theorized from different philosophical perspectives, allowing specific Western philosophical conceptions to dominate the leadership development literature. This paper offers a theoretical analysis of the relational ontology that informs various conceptualizations of selfhood from both African and Western philosophical traditions and unpacks its implications for values-driven leadership. We aim to broaden Western conceptions of leadership development (...) by drawing on twentieth century European philosophy’s insights on relationality, but more importantly, to show how African philosophical traditions precede this literature in its insistence on a relational ontology of the self. To illustrate our theoretical argument, we reflect on an executive education course called values-driven leadership into action, which ran in South Africa, Kenya, and Egypt in 2016, 2017, and 2018. We highlight an African-inspired employment of relationality through its use of the ME-WE-WORLD framework, articulating its theoretical assumptions with embodied experiential learning. (shrink)

This paper resolves some puzzles regarding Spinoza’s appropriations and rejections of various aspects of Bacon’s methodology, and uses these solutions to resolve some long-standing puzzles concerning Spinoza’s modus operandi in the TTP. We argue first that, appearances to contrary, Spinoza takes a consistent line in his assessment of Bacon’s epistemic approach. We argue that Spinoza follows Bacon in grounding his overall epistemic method in a “historiola mentis” (a brief account or history of the mind), and that differences between Spinoza’s and (...) Bacon’s respective historiola mentis can explain Spinoza’s embrace of this inductive method for his interpretation of Scripture in the TTP, as well as his general abandonment of Bacon’s inductive method in the metaphysical investigation of the Ethics. In short, we argue that the “historiola mentis” constructed by Bacon depicts the intellect as an error-prone faculty that needs be continuously restrained by observation and experimentation—a depiction which motivates Bacon’s reformed inductive empiricism. Spinoza accepts this depiction in regard to a subset of the mind’s ideas—the ideas of the imagination, and hence sees the inductive method as suitable for interpreting Scripture. But contra Bacon, Spinoza’s “historiola mentis” also shows that the human mind includes a subset of ideas that yield true, certain knowledge of things “infinite” and sub specie aeternitatis. Spinoza finds these “intellectual” ideas to be quite useful for systematic metaphysics, but of limited use for interpreting historical texts like Scripture. (shrink)

The World Bank recently noted: “Social license to operate has traditionally referred to the conduct of firms with regard to the impact on local communities and the environment, but the definition has expanded in recent years to include issues related to worker and human rights”. In this paper, we examine a factor that can influence the kind of work conditions that can facilitate or obstruct a firm’s attempts to achieve the social license to operate. Specifically, we examine the empirical association (...) between a company’s employee practices and the religiosity of its local community by investigating their fixed and endogenous effects. Using a large and extensive U.S. sample, we find a positive association between the “employee friendly” practices of a firm and the religiosity of the local community after controlling for several firm characteristics. In addition, after mitigating endogeneity with the dynamic panel system generalized method of moment and after employing several other econometric tests, we still find a robust positive association between the religiosity of the local community and employee-friendly practices. Since recent research has shown that the firm’s treatment of its stakeholders is a key to achieving an SLO, and since employees constitute a highly significant stakeholder group, we interpret our results as supporting the view that religion is an important influence on the kinds of employee practices that can increase the likelihood that a firm will acquire the SLO. (shrink)

Research ethics guidelines grew out of several infamous episodes where research subjects were exploited. There is significant international synchronization of guidelines. However, indigenous groups in New Zealand, Canada and Australia have criticized these guidelines as being inadequate for research involving indigenous people and have developed guidelines from their own cultural perspectives. Whilst traditional research ethics guidelines place a lot of emphasis on informed consent, these indigenous guidelines put much greater emphasis on interdependence and trust. This article argues that traditional guidelines (...) are premised on relationships of equal power, and that often the researcher has more power that is not fully equalized by providing information. Where there is a relationship of unequal power, then focusing on interdependence and trust is more likely to achieve ethical safety. We illustrate this thesis by describing the detail of a research project looking at the use of interpreters, where we video-recorded live consultations and then interviewed the patient, interpreter and doctor. We conclude by suggesting that mainstream research ethics guidelines should pay more attention to the development of a trustworthy relationship between subject and researcher, and that, following the lead from clinical medicine, we should develop a culturally competent ethical framework for research on human subjects. (shrink)

In his article, “What should ChatGPT mean for bioethics?” I. Glenn Cohen explores the bioethical implications of Open AI’s chatbot ChatGPT and the use of similar Large Language Models (LLMs) (Cohen...

Workforce diversity has received increasing amounts of attention from academics and practitioners alike. In this article, we examine the empirical association between a firm’s workforce diversity and the degree of religiosity of the firm’s management by investigating their unidirectional and endogenous effects. Employing a large and extensive U.S. sample of firms from the years 1991–2010, we find a positive association between a measure of the firm’s commitment to diversity and the religiosity of the firm’s management after controlling for various firm (...) characteristics. In addition, after controlling for endogeneity with the dynamic panel generalized method of moment, we still find a positive association between the firm’s diversity and management’s religiosity. We interpret these results as supportive of the religious motivation explanation that views the firm as a human community and considers religion as a factor that influences managers to more positively embrace diversity. Our results, however, provide no support for the resource-constraint hypothesis that views the firm as a nexus of contracts and sees managers as aiming to maximize shareholder returns under resource constraints that force them to invest only in projects that have a positive net present value and reject diversity initiatives since these do not have a positive NPV. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 6, June 2019, Page 30-31.

Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic “self-organization” as their primary reference point. I argue in this essay that the Kantian conceptual rubric hinders our historical and theoretical understanding of epigenesis, Romantic and otherwise. Neither a neutral gloss on epigenesis, nor separable from the epistemological deflation of biological knowledge that has received intensive scrutiny in the history and philosophy of science, Kant’s heuristics of autonomous “self-organization” in the third Critique (...) amount to the strategic capture of epigenesis from nature, for thought, in thought’s critical transcendence of nature. This essay looks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his English contemporary Erasmus Darwin to begin to reconstruct the rigorously materialist, naturalist, and empiricist theories of epigenesis marginalized by Kantian argumentation. As theorists of environmental and social collaboration in the ontogeny of viable forms, Lamarck and Darwin illuminate features of our own epigenetic turn obscured by the rhetoric of “self-organization,” allowing us to glimpse an alternative Romantic genealogy of the biological present. (shrink)

The capabilities approach of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum has become an influential viewpoint for addressing issues of social justice and human de- velopment. It has not yet, however, given adequate theoretical consideration to the requirements of environmental sustainability. Sen has focussed on the instrumental importance of human development for achieving sustainability, but has failed to consider the limits of this account, especially with respect to consumption-reduction. Nussbaum has criticised constraining material consumption for its paternalistic prescription of one particular conception (...) of the good life, without considering it as an imperative of justice. We discuss two possible extensions of the capabilities approach. First, the concept of ca- pability ceilings contains several attractive elements, but it also suffers from some shortcomings. Therefore, second, we advocate constraining people’s combinations of functionings in accordance with a personal budget which con- sists of a fair share of environmental resources. (shrink)

A qualitative analysis of societal silences, demonstrating how the unsaid directs social action and shapes individual and collective lives.

This study examines the influence of Christian religion on corporate decisions related to human rights in the United States. Specifically, it examines the empirical association between a company's human rights practices and the Christian religiosity in its local community, as well as individual CEO religiosity in the United States, both of which have not been tested in prior studies. Employing a large sample from the United States, we find a congruent association between the “human rights friendly” practices of a company (...) and the Christian religiosity of the local community. This novel finding is robust to a diverse set of tests. In addition, we find that the association between Christian religiosity in the United States and human rights is more significant in reducing human rights concerns, than it improves human rights strengths. This study interprets these results as upholding the religious morality hypothesis, namely, that companies located in areas with higher religiosity are likely to engage in more human rights-friendly practices, and the United States. Christians consider religion as an influencing factor that encourages managers to embrace human rights. Furthermore, this study finds that individual religious managers tend toward more human rights-friendly practices, supporting our religious manager hypothesis. (shrink)

In order to develop a model of equitable and sustainable distribution, this paper advocates integrating the ecological space paradigm and the capabilities approach. As the currency of distribution, this account proposes a hybrid of capabilities and ecological space. Although the goal of distributive justice should be to secure and promote people’s capabilities now and in the future, doing so requires acknowledging that these capabilities are dependent on the biophysical preconditions as well as inculcating the ethos of restraint. Both issues have (...) been highlighted from the perspective of the ecological space paradigm. Concerning the scope of distributive justice, the integration can combine the advantages of the ecological space paradigm regarding the allocation of the responsibilities involved in environmental sustainability with the strength of the capabilities approach regarding people’s entitlements. The pattern of distribution starts from a capability threshold. In order to achieve this threshold, ecological space should be provided sufficiently, and the remaining ecological space budget could then be distributed according to the equal per capita principle. (shrink)

This study aimed to validate career decision ambiguity tolerance scale-Korean form applicable to a Korean sample. In study 1, 17 items from the original 18-item career decision ambiguity tolerance scale were valid based on IRT. In study 2, using the confirmatory factor analysis, we showed that excluding item 4 from the original scale is better than including it in the three factors model. Given the results of study 1 and 2, the constructs in the 17-item career decision ambiguity tolerance scale-Korean (...) form were valid. In study 3, career decision ambiguity tolerance positively predicted career decision-making self-efficacy, career indecision, and career adaptability respectively, after controlling for calling and career search self-efficacy. Thus, the incremental validity of the career decision ambiguity tolerance scale-Korean form was ensured. In study 4, the reliability of the scale was retained as the test-retest (conducted over a 4-week period) demonstrated adequate results. (shrink)

We enter this energetic debate over causes and consequences of workaholism using autoethnography. Our main contribution is to explore when our autoethnographies of workaholism experiences is narrative, and when it is expressive, living story. The difference in narrative is a re-presentation (following representationalism of a sensory remembrance), where as living story is a matter of reflexivity upon the fragile nature of our life world. We began through analysis of workaholism narratives in our own academic lives, and in the movies of (...) popular culture, the influence of a particular meta-narrative – that of the American Dream. We proceed to juxtapose our own living stories in their struggle with those American Dream narratives. (shrink)