This article evaluates the effect of different human resource management (HRM) practices on organizations’ environmental performance. We develop a model to evaluate the influence of a broad range of HRM practices, including environmental performance criteria in managers’ performance evaluations and two types of internal corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices: socially responsible employee benefits and corporate volunteering practices. To this end, we analyze a sample of 142 manufacturing companies that have completed B Lab’s Impact Assessment process to certify their environmental performance. (...) The results show that including environmental criteria in a higher proportion of managers’ performance evaluations directly impacts organizations’ environmental performance and strengthens the positive effect of other environmental management practices. The findings also demonstrate the direct effects of both types of CSR practices on an organization’s environmental performance. Our study advances recent work on Green HRM and CSR by identifying the specific HRM practices that allow organizations to move from being part of the world’s environmental problem to being part of the solution. (shrink)

A large number of cellular proteins bind ATP, frequently utilizing the free energy of ATP hydrolysis to drive specific biological reactions. Recently, a family of closely related ATP‐binding proteins has been identified, the members of which share considerable sequence identity. These proteins, from both prokaryotic and eukaryotic sources, presumably had a common evolutionary origin and include the product of the white locus of Drosophila, the P‐glycoprotein which confers multidrug resistance on mammalian tumours, and prokaryotic proteins associated with such diverse processes (...) as membrane transport, cell division, nodulation and DNA repair. A comparison of these various proteins provides valuable insights into the function and evolution of the multicomponent systems with which they are associated. (shrink)

This collection of essays focuses on the concepts of tolerance and intolerance as it commemorates the life of James Parkes - the man who pioneered the study of antisemitism and Jewish-non-Jewish relations. The essays analyse many different examples of antisemitism, ambivalence and philosemitism.

Berkeley's philosophy is meant to be a defense of commonsense. However, Berkeley's claim that the ultimate constituents of physical reality are fleeting, causally passive ideas appears to be radically at odds with commonsense. In particular, such a theory seems unable to account for the robust structure which commonsense (and Newtonian physics) takes the world to exhibit. The problem of structure, as I understand it, includes the problem of how qualities can be grouped by their co-occurrence in a single enduring object (...) and how these enduring objects can bear spatiotemporal, causal, and other relations to one another. I argue that Berkeley's solution to these problems lies in his views about language. At one level, human language allows us to exploit patterns in our perceptions to construct a highly structured representation of the physical world which allows us to make accurate predictions at minimal cognitive expense. At a deeper level, these patterns occur in perception because our perceptions themselves form a language in which God speaks to us. (shrink)

An omnipotent being would be a being whose power was unlimited. The power of human beings is limited in two distinct ways: we are limited with respect to our freedom of will, and we are limited in our ability to execute what we have willed. These two distinct sources of limitation suggest a simple definition of omnipotence: an omnipotent being is one that has both perfect freedom of will and perfect efficacy of will. In this paper we further explicate this (...) definition and show that it escapes the standard objections to divine omnipotence. (shrink)

BackgroundRandom acts of kindness can improve wellbeing. However, less is known about the impacts of giving and receiving acts of kindness with strangers on wellbeing and loneliness. Therefore, this study’s objectives were to evaluate a participatory public mental health project involving sending and receiving a card with goodwill messages, to understand how such acts of kindness influence wellbeing and loneliness, and to investigate the potential mechanisms underlying the project’s impacts.Materials and MethodsThis study was an analysis of anonymized service evaluation data (...) collected in the ‘Kindness by Post’ project in 2020. It used a mixed-methods single-group design and data from 289 participants. Changes in wellbeing, loneliness, sense of belonging and hope from baseline to follow-up were analyzed using linear or multinomial logistic regression. Regression models also examined the associations between changes in wellbeing and baseline loneliness or participation level. Free text responses about experiences and suggestions for the project were analyzed using thematic analysis.ResultsParticipants had a small, but statistically significant improvement, in wellbeing equating to 0.21 standard deviations after taking part in the project, as well as improvements in loneliness, sense of belonging and hope. How lonely a participant was at baseline and whether participants both sent and received a kindness card were not associated with improvements in wellbeing. In the qualitative analysis, a desire to help others emerged as the main motivator to take part in the card exchange. Participants reported enhanced personal fulfillment, leading to improvements in wellbeing. Receiving a card could make people feel special and cherished, which was reported to establish a sense of connection with others, with potential benefits for reducing loneliness.ConclusionThis study provided preliminary evidence that the KBP project might improve wellbeing, loneliness, sense of belonging and hope. Sending a kindness card in this project played a predominant role in wellbeing enhancement, and receiving a kindness card could reduce loneliness. This study suggests that the KBP project can be replicated in more contexts in the future, and might improve wellbeing and loneliness in large communities. (shrink)

Alexander Pruss and I have proposed an analysis of omnipotence which makes no use of the problematic terms 'power' and 'ability'. However, this raises an obvious worry: if our analysis is not related to the notion of power, then how can it count as an analysis of omnipotence, the property of being all-powerful, at all? In this paper, I show how omnipotence can be understood as the possession of infinite power (general, universal, or unlimited power) rather than the possession of (...) particular powers. I then argue that the ordinary notions of particular powers or abilities can be understood as applying vague limitations to the notion of infinite power. The vagueness of these limitations is the source of the well-known difficulties in the analysis of ability. (shrink)

Recent scandals involving executive leadership have significantly contributed to the topic of corporate social responsibility (CSR) becoming one of the most important concerns of the management literature in the twenty-first century. The antithesis of CSR is embodied in executive corruption and malfeasance. Unfortunately such things are all too frequent. We view the degree of centrality of leadership, and the primary power motivation of leaders, as key factors that influence the engagement in corruptive leader behavior and consequent corporate social ir-responsibility (CSIR) (...) in organizations. Shared and self-leadership, on the other hand, we introduce as alternatives to traditional top-down centralized views of leadership that can establish needed checks and balances capable of reducing corruptive tendencies. We offer a conceptual model along with several propositions to help guide future research and practice. (shrink)

Traditionally, religious doctrines and practices have been divided into two categories. Those that purport to be justified by natural reason alone are said to be part of natural religion, while those which purport to be justified only by appeal to supernatural revelation are said to be part of revealed religion. One of the central aims of Berkeley's philosophy is to understand and defend both the doctrines and the practices of both natural and revealed (Christian) religion. This chapter will provide a (...) survey of this aspect of Berkeley's thought. (shrink)

Berkeley's main aim in his well-known early works was to identify and refute "the grounds of Scepticism, Atheism, and irreligion." This appears to place Berkeley within a well-established tradition of religious critics of Locke's epistemology, including, most famously, Stillingfleet. I argue that these appearances are deceiving. Berkeley is, in fact, in important respects an opponent of this tradition. According to Berkeley, Locke's earlier critics, including Stillingfleet, had misidentified the grounds of irreligion in Locke's philosophy while all the while endorsing the (...) true grounds of irreligion themselves. Locke's epistemology is innocent; matter and abstraction are to blame. (shrink)

Omnipotence is the property of being all-powerful; it is one of the traditional divine attributes in Western conceptions of God. This notion of an all-powerful being is often claimed to be incoherent because a being who has the power to do anything would, for instance, have the power to draw a round square. However, it is absurd to suppose that any being, no matter how powerful, could draw a round square. A common response to this objection is to assert that (...) defenders of divine omnipotence never intended to claim that God could bring about logical absurdities. This observation about what is not meant by omnipotence does little, however, to clarify just what is meant by that term. Philosophers have therefore attempted to state necessary and sufficient conditions for omnipotence. (shrink)

George Berkeley's linguistic account of sense perception is one of the most central tenets of his philosophy. It is intended as a solution to a wide range of critical issues in both metaphysics and theology. However, it is not clear from Berkeley's writings just how this ‘universal language of the Author of Nature’ is to be interpreted. This paper discusses the nature of the theory of sense perception as language, together with its metaphysical and theological motivations, then proceeds to develop (...) an account of the semantics of the perceptual language, using Berkeley's theory of reference for human language as a guide. (shrink)

The argument from contingency for the existence of God is best understood as a request for an explanation of the total sequence of causes and effects in the universe (‘History’ for short). Many puzzles about how there could be such an explanation arise from the assumption that God is being introduced as one more cause prepended to the sequence of causes that (allegedly) needed explaining. In response to this difficulty, this chapter defends three theses. First, it argues that, if the (...) argument from contingency is to succeed, the explanation of History in terms of God must not be a causal explanation; second, that a particular hypothesis about God’s relation to History—that God is what I call the foundational ground of History—is intelligible and explanatory; third and finally, that the explanatory advantages of this hypothesis cannot be had within the confines of naturalism. (shrink)

According to Thomas Reid, an agent cannot be free unless she has the power to do otherwise. This claim is usually interpreted as a version of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. Against this interpretation, I argue that Reid is committed to the seemingly paradoxical position that an agent may have the power to do otherwise despite the fact that it is impossible that she do otherwise. Reid's claim about the power to do otherwise does not, therefore, entail the Principle of (...) Alternate Possibilities. When it is an agent's character that deprives her of alternate possibilities, she is not thereby deprived of either power or freedom, and this is true even if the agent was not free or active in the formation of her character. (shrink)

Each author first presents his own side, and then they interact through two rounds of objections and replies. Pedagogical features include standard form arguments, section summaries, bolded key terms and principles, a glossary, and annotated reading lists.

To the great puzzlement of his readers, Berkeley begins by arguing that nothing exists other than minds and ideas, but concludes by claiming to have defended the existence of bodies. How can Berkeley's idealism amount to such a defense? I introduce resources from Berkeley's philosophy of language, and especially his analysis of the discourse of physics, to defend a novel answer to this question. According to Berkeley, the technical terms of physics are meaningful despite failing to designate any reality; their (...) meaningfulness derives from the useful role they play in organizing and predicting our experience. I argue that Berkeleian bodies have the same status as these theoretical entities: they are mere 'quasi-entities' introduced by our ways of speaking and thinking in order to serve our practical purposes. Berkeley nevertheless considers this to be a defense of the existence of bodies because he endorses a radically deflationary semantics for 'exists.'. (shrink)

According to commonsense, some collections of objects compose wholes, and others do not. However, philosophers have found serious difficulties with attempts to preserve this thesis, and especially with attempts to preserve the existence of just those composite objects recognized by commonsense. In this paper, I defend a classical solution to this problem: "it is the mind that maketh each thing to be one" (Berkeley, Siris, sect. 356). According to this view, which I call 'mereological idealism,' it is when a plurality (...) is united in thought under a concept that a unified whole comes to exist. After explaining the view in more detail, I show how it escapes three standard arguments against commonsense views of composition. (shrink)

Jones (theology, Loyola College) argues that the most coherent account of moral judgement is one grounded in, and lived in the presence of, the mystery of the Triune God. Particular attention is given to the importance of friendship and the ways in which people learn to acquire and exercise the virtues in making moral judgments. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

A great deal of the criticism directed at Locke's theory of abstract ideas assumes that a Lockean abstract idea is a special kind of idea which by its very nature either represents many diverse particulars or represents separately things that cannot exist in separation. This interpretation of Locke has been challenged by scholars such as Kenneth Winkler and Michael Ayers who regard it as uncharitable in light of the obvious problems faced by this theory of abstraction. Winkler and Ayers argue (...) that Locke instead held that to have an abstract idea is to attend selectively to some portion of the content of a particular idea. On this view, to have an abstract idea is not to have a special kind of idea but to have an ordinary idea in a special way. Ayers argues that Locke inherited this theory from Arnauld. I argue that the case made by Ayers for the attribution of the extrinsic theory to Locke rests on a misinterpretation of Arnauld. In fact, both Locke and Arnauld regard selective attention as part of a process whereby a new kind of idea is constructed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE LOVE WHICH LOVE'S KNOWLEDGE KNOWS NOT: NUSSBAUM'S EVASION OF CHRISTIANITY L. GREGORY JONES Loyola College Baltimore, Maryland WITH THE PUBLICATION in 1986 of The Fragilty of Goodness, Martha Nussbaum established herelf as a central figure on the intellectual stage.1 The book is elegantly written and eloquently argued, one of those rare books whose depth of insight is coupled with an ease of expression. Equally at home in the (...) scholarship of both classical antiquity and contemporary philosophy, The Fragility of Goodness stimulated conversations and arguments among a wide range of scholars. At the same time, however, there were hints that Nussbaum's philosophical insights and classical acumen did not extend to a knowledge of Christian texts, much less a willingness to engage with them. For example, in a note to the Introduction of the book, Nussbaum observes : When we do not try to see [the Greeks] through the lens of Christian beliefs we can not only see them more truly; we can also see how true they are to us-that is, to a continuous historical tradition of human ethical experience that has not been either displaced or altered by the supremacy of Christian (and Kantian) teaching. (FG, p. 15) As such a quotation indicates, Nussbaum vastly oversimplifies 1 Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 554 pp., $19.95pb. Further citations to this work will be made parenthetically in the text with the abbreviation FG. 323 324 L. GREGORY JONES Christian theology and/or Christian teaching, not only in relation to " the Greeks " but also about such questions as vulnerability, tragedy, and friendship. That this is the case becomes more explicit in her recent book Love's Knowledge, a collection of essays about the relationship between philosophy and literature.2 Here it becomes clear that Nussbaum's project attempts to retrieve an Aristotelian ethics that would displace not only Kantian or Utilitarian ethics but also Christian ethics. But whereas Nussbaum explicitly criticizes Kantian and Utilitarian positions on both methodological and substantive grounds, she evades engagement with Christian thought. In order to understand how and why this is the case, it is necessary first to explicate in greater detail her Aristotelian position as it develops in The Fragility of Goodness and then Love's Knowledge. In The Fragility of Goodness Nussbaum addresses three central issues : ( 1) the role in " the human good life " of activities and relationships that are, in their nature, especially vulnerable to reversal; (2) the relationship among such components as friendship, love, and political activity in a good life; and (3) the relationship between self-sufficiency and the more ungovernable parts of the human being's internal makeup (see FG, pp. 6-7). Nussbaum proceeds to explore these issues through analyses of diverse Greek tragedies as well as some of the central texts of both Plato and Aristotle. Her approach, she indicates in that book, is Aristotelian; she thinks that Aristotle's central question, "How should a human being live?", should be the central question that frames any ethical inquiry-as opposed, say, to the questions put by Kant or Mill that focus on what one should do. Moreover, she contends that an Aristotelian approach engages the intuitions and beliefs of an interlocutor or reader in a " reflective dialogue " with a 2 Martha C. Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 432 pp., $42.50. Further citations to this work will be made parenthetically in the text with the abbreviation LK. NUSSBAUM'S EVASION OF CHRISTIANITY 325 series of complex ethical conceptions presented for exploration (FG, p. 10). But it is not only her approach that is Aristotelian; so also is the substance of her ethical position. Nussbaum prefers a commitment to the complexities of particularity (which she considers characteristic of the tragedians and Aristotle) to the quest for self-sufficiency (a nuanced version of which she finds in Plato). Likewise, she describes Aristotle and the tragedians as appreciative of the ethical, and indeed rational, significance of the emotions and prefers this to Plato's ostensible rationalism. Thus Nussbaum's perspective in The... (shrink)

In this essay I argue that Rawls does not establish the priority of the right over the good, and that his notion of the original position creates more problems than it solves. I further argue that Rawls, even in his recent proposal for an overlapping consensus, misdiagnoses the problems of modern society and our capacity for justice. I suggest that what we need is not so much theories of justice or methods to abstract from conceptions of the good as discriminating (...) patterns to judge whether, and to what extent, our institutions are sustaining or corroding our social practices that might serve justice and/or make us more just people. (shrink)

Anthony Collins’s 1710 pamphlet _A Vindication of the Divine Attributes_ is not a vindication of the divine attributes. But what precisely is it? I argue that Collins’s _Vindication_ is best interpreted as a kind of prelude to his later _Discourse of Free-Thinking_ (1713). The Vindication aims to show that our beliefs about the existence and nature of God cannot rest on the authority of the clergy. Instead we must, as Collins puts it, ‘impartially examine every thing (how Sacred soever it (...) may appear … before [being] examin’d)’. Freethinking, Collins argues, must extend even so far as questioning the foundational principles of natural religion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. By IRIS MURDOCH. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane; New York: Viking, 1992. $35.00. Dame Iris Murdoch is familiar to most people as a witty and en· gaging novelist whose twenty-four hooks of fiction can he read on a variety of levels. They are wonderful stories, hut the philosophically acute reader will also enjoy Murdoch's judgments, polemics, and inhouse jokes about philosophers and philosophical (...) views. Comparatively few people are aware of Murdoch's previous scholarly studies: Sartre, Romantic Rationalist, The Sovereignty of the Good, The Fire and the Sun; and Acastos. Even so, those familiar with these hooks will recognize the profound impact she has had on debates within moral philosophy. She has been at the forefront of the move· ment that has rehabilitated the central importance of such notions as goodness, the Good, virtue, and the moral life as a journey. So it is not surprising that Murdoch has returned to the genre of philosophical argument to advance her views on the relationship between metaphysics and morals. But it is surprising that her argument exhibits neither the clarity of thought characteristic of the analytic philosophy in which she was trained nor the dramatic narrative of her novels. Indeed the hook reads like a collage of lecture notes, complete with extensive quotations from other people's thoughts with minimal com· mentary. Further, the chapter titles (e.g., " Fact and Value," " Schopenhauer," " Consciousness and Thought-I," " Derrida and Struc· turalism," " Consciousness and Thought-II," "Notes on Will and Duty," " Axioms, Duties, Eros," " Void ") shed little light on the overall structure or argument of the hook. One cannot help hut have the impression that Murdoch spent less time crafting the argument of this hook than she does in crafting the story line and characters of her novels. This is not to say, of course, that there is not much to he learned from Murdoch's perspective. She is remarkably erudite, and her discussion of various themes, figures, and issues often yields fascinating insights. But the whole is considerably less than the sum of its often interesting parts. I have already suggested that this is partly because of the structure and style in which the hook is written. But the hook 687 688 BOOK REVIEWS is also disappointing, and perhaps more determinatively, because of the overall perspective she seeks to deploy and defend. Readers of Murdoch's work have heretofore often wondered about the relationship between her avowed Platonism and her interest in Christianity. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals has the virtue of clarifying that relationship, hut the result is unpersuasive. At the heart of Murdoch's Platonism is her recasting of the allegory of the cave from The Republic. The moral life is an arduous struggle to ascend from the cave (represented, as in her earlier works, by " the fat, relentless ego ") by a dispossession of the self so that we can apprehend a little less imperfectly the perfect form of the Good. As Murdoch puts it, Plato assumes the internal relation of value, truth, cogmtion. Virtue (as compassion, humility, courage) involves a desire for and achievement of truth instead of falsehood, reality instead of appearance. Goodness involves truth.seeking knowledge and ipso facto a discipline of desire. ' Getting things right ', as in meticulous grammar or mathematics, is truth-seeking as virtue. Learning anything properly demands (virtuous ) attention. Here the idea of truth plays a crucial role (as it does also in Kant) and reality emerges as the object of truthful vision, and virtuous action as the product of such vision. This is a picture of the omnipresence of morality and evaluation in human life (p. 39). Such a depiction ought to resonate quite deeply with Christians, something not lost on Murdoch when she writes a few pages earlier: "There are innumerable points at which we have to detach ourselves, to change our orientation, to redirect our desire and refresh and purify our energy, to keep on looking in the right direction: to attend upon the grace that comes through faith " (p. 25). But Murdoch's "grace" and her "truth-seeking as virtue," among other themes, involve something quite different from what Christians... (shrink)

Metaphysical rationalism is the view that, necessarily, every fact that stands in need of a metaphysical (grounding) explanation has one. Varieties of metaphysical rationalism include classical theism, Spinozism, spacetime priority monism, and axiarchism. Grounding indeterminism is the view that the same ground, in precisely the same circumstances, might not have grounded what it in fact grounds. I argue that a plausible defense of any form of metaphysical rationalism requires a commitment to grounding indeterminism.

Out of the ashes of the post-modern critique of metaphysics comes a series of important essays which re-think the place of metaphysics in theological and philosophical inquiry. This book ranges across a variety of philosophical and theological traditions, charting new directions for theological reflection.

The central unifying element in the philosophy of Peter Browne is his theory of analogy. Although Browne's theory was originally developed to deal with some problems about religious language, Browne regards analogy as a general purpose cognitive mechanism whereby we substitute an idea we have to stand for an object of which we, strictly speaking, have no idea. According to Browne, all of our ideas are ideas of sense, and ideas of sense are ideas of material things. Hence we can (...) conceive of spiritual things – including even our own spirit – only by analogy. One interesting application Browne makes of his theory is an account of how concepts such as knowledge can be correctly applied to beings that have no intrinsic properties in common, such as non-human animals, humans, angels, and God. I argue that this is best understood as what, in the contemporary literature, is known as a ‘multiple realizability’ problem and that Browne's solution to this problem has important similarities to functionalist theories in recent philosophy of mind. (shrink)