Research in public relations ethics has focused primarily on moral philosophy and applied normative ethics. Although these efforts may help to theoretically "ground" ethical behavior, they offer little help in understanding the complex processes by which public relations practitioners reason through moral decisions. This article is designed to introduce moral reasoning theories into public relations ethics research by using the Defining Issues Test to generate baseline data for future research.

A profoundly interdisciplinary approach to comparative scholarship, Ecologies of Participation: IAgents, Shamans, Mystics, and Diviners argues for a radical neostructuralist stance. Developing recent theories and methods in religious studies, Cabot argues for a participatory approach to comparative studies.

Le problème épistémologique de la confirmation scientifique consiste à déterminer ou comparer le degré de confirmation des hypothèses scientifiques (c’est-à-dire le niveau d’avantage épistémique que nous devons leur accorder) au regard des données empiriques. Ce problème est la plupart du temps traité dans le cadre d’une interprétation probabiliste du raisonnement inductif, notamment au moyen du calcul bayésien, de telle sorte que l’on parle de théorie bayésienne de la confirmation. Nous proposerons ici de considérer la théorie poppérienne de la corroboration comme (...) une théorie alternative de la confirmation scientifique, qui se caractériserait justement par son rejet radical des probabilités et de l’induction. Plus précisément, nous soutiendrons ici, contre certaines lectures de Popper, que le concept poppérien de corroboration peut être assimilé à une forme de confirmation, et nous essaierons d’établir quels seraient les principes d’une théorie poppérienne de la confirmation. Nous souhaitons pouvoir ainsi comparer les approches bayésiennes et poppériennes du problème de la confirmation scientifique, et notamment souligner les différentes incitations méthodologiques qu’elles entraînent dans la recherche scientifique. (shrink)

Malebranche et Leibniz affirment que Dieu a créé le meilleur des mondes possibles. Mais ces mondes possibles remplissent des fonctions argumentatives sensiblement différentes dans leurs théodicées respectives. S’ils s’accordent tous deux pour définir l’ordre d’un monde par la généralité de volontés divines, ils ont toutefois des conceptions distinctes de son unité. Les mondes malebranchiens peuvent exister dans le même espace alors que la maximalité des mondes leibniziens empêche une telle possibilité. Ces deux modes de composition des mondes règlent différemment le (...) choix divin. Ainsi, les mondes malebranchiens visent uniquement à prouver la perfection de ce choix, tandis que les mondes leibniziens permettent également d’en démontrer la liberté et la contingence. (shrink)

A plea for a clinical year in the course of theological study -- Ethics and the medical profession -- Ethics and business -- Ethics and education -- Ethics and social work.

Excerpt from Everyday Ethics A successful book on methods of teaching ethics will improve in the schoolroom the art of instruction in the most difficult province of study and practice. Ethics relates to all manner of deeds and habits of doing which concern one's fellow men, either as private individuals or as members of institutions - members of the social whole. One may conduct himself in such a manner as to obstruct the actions of his fellow men and thereby reduce (...) their labours and strivings to a nullity, more or less, according to his power and skill. Or, on the other hand, he may act in such a manner as to reenforce their labours and strivings and increase the net product of human endeavour. The fact that there are rational objects to be achieved by humanity - name them collectively as the conquest of nature for man's use and the peaceful combination of man with men to the end that each individual may share in the experience of all individuals - these objects ought to be the common aim of all rational beings: this fact furnishes the basis and norm of ethics. It makes evident the Source of Power. The individual who promotes the twofold end of civilisation increases the aggregate power of mankind and at the same time shares in that power. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Le holisme de la réfutation, outhèse de Duhem-Quine, affirme que nous ne pouvons pas tester isolément une hypothèse scientifique, mais seulement des ensembles d’hypothèses. Ainsi, en cas d’échec d’un test, nous pouvons seulement conclure qu’au moins une hypothèse d’un ensemble est falsifiée, mais nous ne pouvons pasdéterminer laquelle.Bien que cette thèse soit partagée par Duhem et Quine, on néglige régulièrementdes différences entre leurs analyses, alors qu’ilsne s’appuient pas sur les mêmes arguments, et parviennent à des conclusions qui se contredisent sur (...) des points essentiels. Nous proposonsdans cet articled’exposer leholisme duhemien, et de le comparer au holisme quinien.Nouscherchons surtout à montrer que le holisme duhemien n’empêche pasla falsifiabilité des hypothèses scientifiques. (shrink)

La crítica de arte nació tras la caída de valores absolutos y jueces arbitrarios. Su objetivo era formar a la opinión pública en una sociedad abierta y libre. La crítica de arte de la sociedad postindustrial ha hecho de todo el pasado un valor absoluto. En su formato periodístico que llega más a la mayoría de ciudadanos se ha erigido en juez supremo y arbitrario.

From the always quoted beginning of Aesthetic Theory, I offer a brief overview through the absence of tittles in contemporary art, and its connection with the problem of the body.

This is a new release of the original 1933 edition.

This is the first book-length treatment of the metaphysical foundations of ecological ethics. The author seeks to provide a metaphysical illumination of the fundamental ecological intuitions that we are in some sense `one with' nature and that everything is connected with everything else. Drawing on contemporary cosmology, systems theory and the history of philosophy, Freya Mathews elaborates a new metaphysics of `interconnectedness'. She offers an inspiring vision of the spiritual implications of ecology, which leads to a deepening of our conception (...) of conservation. (shrink)

This article connects value-sensitive design to Gibson’s affordance theory: the view that we perceive in terms of the ease or difficulty with which we can negotiate space. Gibson’s ideas offer a nonsubjectivist way of grasping culturally relative values, out of which we develop a concept of political affordances, here understood as openings or closures for social action, often implicit. Political affordances are equally about environments and capacities to act in them. Capacities and hence the severity of affordances vary with age, (...) health, social status and more. This suggests settings are selectively permeable, or what postphenomenologists call multistable. Multistable settings are such that a single physical location shows up differently – as welcoming or hostile – depending on how individuals can act on it. In egregious cases, authoritarian governments redesign politically imbued spaces to psychologically cordon both them and the ideologies they represent. Selective permeability is also orchestrated according to business interests, which is symptomatic of commercial imperatives increasingly dictating what counts as moral and political goods. (shrink)

A bold and original work in ecocosmology and metaphysics.

Three types of objections have been raised against sweatshops. According to their critics, sweatshops are (1) exploitative, (2) coercive, and (3) harmful to workers. In “The Ethical and Economic Case Against Sweatshop Labor: A Critical Assessment,” Powell and Zwolinski critique all three objections and thereby offer what is arguably the most powerful defense of sweatshops in the philosophical literature to date. This article demonstrates that, whether or not unregulated sweatshops are exploitative or coercive, they are, pace Powell and Zwolinski, harmful (...) to workers. (shrink)

Fairness of Artificial Intelligence decisions has become a big challenge for governments, companies, and societies. We offer a theoretical contribution to consider AI ethics outside of high-level and top-down approaches, based on the distinction between “reality” and “world” from Luc Boltanski. To do so, we provide a new perspective on the debate on AI fairness and show that criticism of ML unfairness is “realist”, in other words, grounded in an already instituted reality based on demographic categories produced by institutions. Second, (...) we show that the limits of “realist” fairness corrections lead to the elaboration of “radical responses” to fairness, that is, responses that radically change the format of data. Third, we show that fairness correction is shifting to a “domination regime” that absorbs criticism, and we provide some theoretical and practical avenues for further development in AI ethics. Using an ad hoc critical space stabilized by reality tests alongside the algorithm, we build a shared responsibility model which is compatible with the radical response to fairness issues. Finally, this paper shows the fundamental contribution of pragmatic sociology theories, insofar as they afford a social and political perspective on AI ethics by giving an active role to material actors such as database formats on ethical debates. In a context where data are increasingly numerous, granular, and behavioral, it is essential to renew our conception of AI ethics on algorithms in order to establish new models of responsibility for companies that take into account changes in the computing paradigm. (shrink)

In this highly original work, Mathew A. Foust breaks new ground in comparative studies through his exploration of the connections between Confucianism and the American Transcendentalist and Pragmatist movements. In his examination of a broad range of philosophers, including Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Peirce, William James, and Josiah Royce, Foust traces direct lines of influence from early translations of Confucian texts and brings to light conceptual affinities that have been previously overlooked. Combining resources (...) from both traditions, Confucianism and American Philosophy offers fresh insights into contemporary problems and exemplifies the potential of cross-cultural dialogue in an increasingly pluralistic world. (shrink)

In a world which can be increasingly described as a “society of organizations,” it is incumbent upon organizational researchers to account for the role of organizations in determining the well-being of societies and the individuals that comprise them. Workplace spirituality is a young area of inquiry with potentially strong relevance to the well-being of individuals, organizations, and societies. Previous literature has not examined ethical dilemmas related to workplace spirituality that organizations might expect based upon the co-existence of multiple ethical work (...) climates, nor has previous literature accounted for the relevance of the cosmopolitan source of moral reasoning in the ethical treatment of workplace spirituality. The purpose of this paper is to address these gaps by articulating two such ethical dilemmas related to workplace spirituality: the “quiet desperation” dilemma and the instrumentality dilemma. Moreover, I propose two theoretical contexts that foster “both-and” rather than “either-or” thinking, thereby mitigating the relationships between climate combinations and conflictual aspects of the ethical dilemmas. For the “quiet desperation” dilemma, I propose a person–organization fit perspective to emphasize diversity of individual preferences instead of a managerially prescribed uniformity of spirituality. For the instrumentality dilemma, I propose a multiparadigm approach to workplace spirituality research to avoid the privileging of one research interest over another. I conclude with suggestions for future research. (shrink)

Biomimicry as a design concept is indeed revolutionary in its implications for human systems of production, but it is a concept in need of further philosophical elaboration and development. To this end certain philosophical principles underlying the organization of living systems generally are identified and it is argued that not only our systems of production but also our psychocultural patterns of desire need to be reorganized in accordance with these principles if we are collectively to achieve the integration into nature (...) to which biomimicry aspires. Even were this reorganization to be effected however, there is still an ethically momentous ambiguity in biomimicry that needs to be teased out before we can be assured that biomimicry will indeed produce the bioinclusive sustainability outcomes that it seems to promise. (shrink)

While the bioethics literature demonstrates that the field has spent substantial time and thought over the last four decades on the goals, methods, and desired outcomes for service and training in bioethics, there has been less progress defining the nature and goals of bioethics research and scholarship. This gap makes it difficult both to describe the breadth and depth of these areas of bioethics and, importantly, to gauge their success. However, the gap also presents us with an opportunity to define (...) this scope of work for ourselves and to help shape the broader conversation about the impact of academic research. Because of growing constraints on academic funding, researchers and scholars in many fields are being asked to demonstrate and also forecast the value and impact of their work. To do that, and also to satisfy ourselves that our work has meaningful effect, we must understand how our work can motivate change and how that change can be meaningfully measured. In a field as diverse as bioethics, the pathways to and metrics of change will likewise be diverse. It is therefore critical that any assessment of the impact of bioethics research and scholarship be informed by an understanding of the nature of the work, its goals, and how those goals can and ought to be furthered. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model that connects individual bioethics projects to the broader goals of scholarship, describing the translation of research and scholarly output into changes in thinking, practice, and policy. One of the key implications of the model is that impact in bioethics is generally the result of a collection of projects rather than of any single piece of research or scholarship. Our goal is to lay the groundwork for a thoroughgoing conversation about bioethics research and scholarship that will advance and shape the important conversation about their impact. (shrink)

Prof. Lodge explores the use of ideology as a concept to understand ethical issues. He observes an ideological transition occurring in the United States, one that has been under way for some 80 years from what he refers to as Individualism to Communitarianism. Many ethical questions depend for an answer on which ideology is dominant or which is appropriate.

Introduction: the figure of this world -- 1. The question of political ontology -- 2. The poetic experience of the world -- 3. The myth of the earth -- 4. The unbearable -- 5. The creature before the law -- 6. The animal for which animality is an issue -- 7. Understanding the happy -- 8. The picture and its captives -- 9. The passing of the figure of this world.