New concerns have emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic that greatly impact employees and many other aspects in organizations. We have highlighted the major organizational issues during COVID-19 and classified the relevant research findings based on 45 recent articles. Main themes identified include work setting, perceptions of COVID-19, employee wellbeing, organizational strategies, and influences on career behaviors. Employees have faced challenges due to work conditions that have shifted from traditional commuting to telework. Employees have also become aware of the negative current (...) situation, so their overall wellbeing has been threatened. In response, organizations have strived to promote positive psychological capital for employees as they attempt to cope with this crisis. Organizations have tried to maintain and manage both their employees and their business. People tended to adjust their career-related behaviors based on how they perceived their own wellbeing and organizational strategies. (shrink)

This paper analyzes and evaluates quine's influential thesis that epistemology should become a chapter of empirical psychology. quine's main point, it is argued, is that normativity must be banished from epistemology and, more generally, philosophy. i claim that without a normative concept of justification, we lose the very concept of knowledge, and that belief ascription itself becomes impossible without a normative concept of rationality. further, the supervenience of concepts of epistemic appraisal shows that normative epistemology is indeed possible.

Somewhat loose arguments that non-reductive physicalist realism is untenable. Anomalous monism makes the mental irrelevant, functionalism is compatible with species-specific reduction, and supervenience is weak or reductive.

The International Research library of Philosophy collects in book form a wide range of important and influential essays in philosophy, drawn predominantly from English language journals. Each volume in the library deals with a field of enquiry which has received significant attention in philosophy in the last 25 years and is edited by a philosopher noted in that field.

Developing and motivating the notion of supervenience. Investigating the relationship to reducibility and definability (equivalence, under certain conditions), and to microphysical determination.

In this paper I will revisit an argument that I have called “the supervenience argument”; it is sometimes called “the exclusion argument” in the literature. I want to reconsider several aspects of this argument in light of some of the criticisms and comments it has elicited, clarifying some points and offering a slightly reformulated—and improved—version of the argument. My primary aim, however, is to discuss and respond to Ned Block’s edifying and challenging critique of the argument in his “Do Causal (...) Powers Drain Away?”—in particular, his claim that the argument has the consequence that if there is no bottom microphysical level, causal powers will “drain away”, leaving us with no causation anywhere. The supervenience argument was designed to show that on a certain popular and influential view of mentality and its relationship to the physical, mental properties turn out to be epiphenomenal, that is, without causal powers of their own. (shrink)

THIS PAPER CORRECTS AN ERROR IN MY EARLIER PAPER, "CONCEPTS OF SUPERVENIENCE" ("PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH", VOLUME 45, 1984), AND PRESENTS FURTHER MATERIAL ON SUPERVENIENCE. THE ERROR IS THE CLAIM THAT "GLOBAL" SUPERVENIENCE ENTAILS "STRONG" SUPERVENIENCE. HOWEVER, IT IS ARGUED THAT THIS FAILURE OF ENTAILMENT ONLY GOES TO SHOW THE INADEQUACY OF GLOBAL SUPERVENIENCE AS AN EXPLICATION OF "DEPENDENCY" OR "DETERMINATION" RELATION, AND, IN PARTICULAR, THAT MATERIALISM FORMULATED IN TERMS OF GLOBAL SUPERVENIENCE APPEARS TOO WEAK. (IT IS POINTED OUT, AMONG (...) OTHER THINGS, THAT GLOBAL SUPERVENIENCE DOES NOT ENTAIL "WEAK" SUPERVENIENCE). A STRONGER FORM OF GLOBAL SUPERVENIENCE, BASED ON "SIMILARITY" RATHER THAN "INDISCERNIBILITY" BETWEEN WORLDS, IS FORMULATED AND BRIEFLY DISCUSSED. (shrink)

The aim of the present study was to investigate the association between work-related moral stress, moral climate and moral sensitivity in mental health nursing. By means of the three scales Hospital Ethical Climate Survey, Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and Work-Related Moral Stress, 49 participants’ experiences were assessed. The results of linear regression analysis indicated that moral stress was determined to a degree by the work place’s moral climate as well as by two aspects of the mental health staff’s moral sensitivity. The (...) nurses’ experience of ‘moral burden’ or ‘moral support’ increased or decreased their experience of moral stress. Their work-related moral stress was determined by the job-associated moral climate and two aspects of moral sensitivity. Our findings showed an association between three concepts: moral sensitivity, moral climate and moral stress. Despite being a small study, the findings seem relevant for future research leading to theory development and conceptual clarity. We suggest that more attention be given to methodological issues and developing designs that allow for comparative research in other disciplines, as well as in-depth knowledge of moral agency. Copyright © 2011 by SAGE Publications. (shrink)

We offer a precautionary account of why business managers should proactively rethink about what kinds of automation firms ought to implement, by exploring two challenges that automation will potentially pose. We engage the current debate concerning whether life without work opportunities will incur a meaning crisis, offering an argument in favor of the position that if technological unemployment occurs, the machine age may be a structurally limited condition for many without work opportunities to have or add meaning to their lives. (...) We term this the axiological challenge. This challenge, if it turns out to be persuasive, leads to a second challenge, to which managers should pay special attention: the teleological challenge, a topic especially relevant to the broad literature about corporate purpose and governance. We argue that both the shareholder profit-maximization model and its major alternative, stakeholder theory, are insufficient to address the meaning crisis. Unless rebutted, the two challenges compel business leaders to proactively rethink the purpose of business for future society. Otherwise, businesses will be contributors to a major ethical crisis and societal externality in the coming society. (shrink)

What are the neural correlates of conscious visual awareness? Tackling this question requires contrasting neural correlates of stimulus processing culminating in visual awareness with neural correlates of stimulus processing unaccompanied by awareness. To contrast these two neural states, one must be able to erase an otherwise visible stimulus from awareness. This paper describes and critiques visual phenomena involving dissociation of physical stimulation and conscious awareness: degraded stimulation, visual masking, visual crowding, bistable figures, binocular rivalry, motion-induced blindness, inattentional blindness, change blindness (...) and attentional blink. While no single strategy stands above the others, those producing changing visual awareness despite invariant physical stimulation are clearly preferable. (shrink)

Democracy -- Political participation -- Value of democracy -- Procedure and substance -- Justice -- State coercion and criminal punishment -- Sufficiency and equality -- Humanitarian intervention.

The aim of this Swedish study was to develop the concept of moral sensitivity in health care practice. This process began with an overview of relevant theories and perspectives on ethics with a focus on moral sensitivity and related concepts, in order to generate a theoretical framework. The second step was to construct a questionnaire based on this framework by generating a list of items from the theoretical framework. Nine items were finally selected as most appropriate and consistent with the (...) research team’s understanding of the concept of moral sensitivity. The items were worded as assumptions related to patient care. The questionnaire was distributed to two groups of health care personnel on two separate occasions and a total of 278 completed questionnaires were returned. A factor analysis identified three factors: sense of moral burden, moral strength and moral responsibility. These seem to be conceptually interrelated yet indicate that moral sensitivity may involve more dimensions than simply a cognitive capacity, particularly, feelings, sentiments, moral knowledge and skills. (shrink)

A common picture of evolution by natural selection sees it as a process through which organisms change so that they become better adapted to their environment. However, agents do not merely respond to the challenges their environments pose. They modify their environments, filtering and transforming the action of the environment on their bodies A beaver, in making a dam, engineers a stream, increasing both the size of its safe refuge and reducing its seasonal variability. Beavers, like many other animals, are (...) ecological engineers. They act to modify the physical challenges posed by their environment. Nests, burrows and other shelters reduce the impacts of adverse weather and of other agents. Animal also modify their exposure to biological risks. Hygienic behaviour reduces the impact of disease. Intensive grooming; moving to new roosts; using a. (shrink)

Florijn’s helpful discussion of the Heringa case illustrates the difficulties in drawing a boundary on eligibility conditions for EAS. In Heringa, the Dutch Supreme Court reaffirmed...

Two concepts of supervenience, "strong supervenience" and "weak supervenience," are characterized and contrasted, And their major properties established. Supervenience as commonly characterized by philosophers is shown to correspond to weak supervenience, Whereas the intended concept is often the stronger relation. Strong supervenience is applied to explicate the notion of "supervenient causation," and it is argued that macro-Causal relations can be understood as cases of supervenient causation, And that causal relations involving psychological events, Too, Can be so understood.

We report the results of an investigation of nurses’ and physicians’ sensitivity to ethical dimensions of clinical practice. The sample consisted of 113 physicians working in general medical settings, 665 psychiatrists, 150 nurses working in general medical settings, and 145 nurses working in psychiatry. The instrument used was the Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire (MSQ), a self-reporting Likert-type questionnaire consisting of 30 assumptions related to moral sensitivity in health care practice. Each of these assumptions was categorized into a theoretical dimension of moral (...) sensitivity: relational orientation, structuring moral meaning, expressing benevolence, modifying autonomy, experiencing moral conflict, and following the rules. Significant differences in responses were found between health care professionals from general medical settings and those working in psychiatry. The former agreed to a greater extent with the assumptions in the categories ‘meaning’ and ‘autonomy’ and to a lesser degree with the categories ‘benevolence’ and ‘conflict’. Moreover, those from the psychiatric sector agreed to a greater extent to the use of coercion if necessary. Significant differences were also found for some of the MSQ categories, between physicians and nurses, and between males and females. (shrink)

Given the widening gap between the number of individuals on transplant waiting lists and the availability of donated organs, as well as the recent plateau in donations based on neurological criteria, there has been a growing interest in expanding donation after circulatory determination of death. While the prevalence of this form of organ donation continues to increase, many thorny ethical issues remain, often creating moral distress in both clinicians and families. In this article, we address one of these issues, namely, (...) the challenges surrounding patient and surrogate informed consent for donation after circulatory determination of death. First we discuss several general concerns regarding consent related to this form of organ donation, and then we address additional issues that are unique to three different patient categories: adult patients with medical decision-making capacity or potential capacity, adult patients who lack capacity, and pediatric patients. (shrink)

In this article, I present a substantive proposal about the timing and nature of the final stage of the evolution of full human language, the transition from so-called “protolanguage” to language, and on the origins of a simple protolanguage with structure and displaced reference; a proposal that depends on the idea that the initial expansion of communicative powers in our lineage involved a much expanded role for gesture and mime. But though it defends a substantive proposal, the article also defends (...) and illustrates a methodological proposal too. I argue that language is a special case of a more general phenomenon—cumulative cultural evolution—and while we rarely have direct information about communication, we have more direct information about the cumulative cultural evolution of technical skill, ecological strategies, and social complexity. These same factors also enable us to make a reasonable estimate of the intergenerational social learning capacities of these communities and of the communicative demands these communities face. For example, we can, at least tentatively, identify forms of cooperation that are stable only if third party information is transmitted widely, cheaply, and accurately. So we can use these more direct markers of information accumulation to locate, in broad terms, the period in our evolutionary history during which we became lingual. (shrink)

I shall discuss some of the relations among metaphysical modality, essence, and explanation. Marion Godman, Antonella Mallozzi and David Papineau have recently argued that the essence of a kind consists in its super-explanatory property—a single property that is causally responsible for a multitude of commonalities shared by the instances of the kind. And they argue that this super-explanatory account of essence offers a principled account of aposteriori necessities concerning kinds. I shall examine their arguments and argue that they are fallacious. (...) Along the way, a general problem will also emerge that applies to any account that tries to explicate the notion of essence in terms of an explanatory relation. (shrink)

The standard view of the function of reason is that it emerged to enable individuals to make better judgements and choices. Once individuals could think better, and once we had suitable communicative tools, individual reasoning acquired a public face; we reasoned together as well as privately, in our own mind. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that this gets the story the wrong way around: reasoning evolved for public purposes: to persuade, negotiate, assess. Once it was established publically, perhaps it (...) acquired a private function too. With the exception of a few minor complaints, this evolutionary case is well made. However, Mercier and Sperber embed their evolutionary case within a modular view of the mind and suggest a modular view of public reasoning itself. While I find the evolutionary case persuasive, I am sceptical of the cognitive science framework. (shrink)

Philip Kitcher’s The Ethical Project trios to vindicates ethics through an analysis of its evolutionary and cultural history, a history which in turn, he thinks, supports a particular conception of the role of moral thinking and normative practices in human social life. As Kitcher sees it, that role could hardly be more central: most of what makes human life human, and preferable to the fraught and impoverished societies of the great apes, depends on moral cognition. Prom this view of the (...) role of the ethical project as a social technology, Kitcher derives an account of moral progress and even moral truth: a normative analogue of the idea that truth is the convergence of rational enquiry. To Kitcher’s history, I present an anti-history. Most of what is good about human social life depends on the expansion of our social emotions, not on our capacities to articulate and internalise explicit norms. Indeed, since the Holocene and the origins of complex society, normative thought and normative institutions have been more prominent as tools of exploitation and oppression than as mechanisms of a social peace that balances individual desire with collective co-operation. I argue that the vindication project fails in its own terms: even given Kitcher’s distinctive pragmatic concept of vindication, history debunks rather than vindicates moral cognition. (shrink)

Hempel and Oppenheim have stated in Part III of their paper “Studies in the Logic of Explanation” [2] a set of conditions for deductive explanation. However, their analysis has come under damaging systematic criticisms in a recent paper by Eberle, Kaplan and Montague [1], The principal aim of the present paper is to review the Hempel-Oppenheim analysis and propose a strengthened version of it that avoids the recent criticisms.

The acquisition of English noun and verb morphology is modeled using a single-system connectionist network. The network is trained to produce the plurals and past tense forms of a large corpus of monosyllabic English nouns and verbs. The developmental trajectory of network performance is analyzed in detail and is shown to mimic a number of important features of the acquisition of English noun and verb morphology in young children. These include an initial error-free period of performance on both nouns and (...) verbs followed by a period of intermittent over-regularization of irregular nouns and verbs. Errors in the model show evidence of phonological conditioning and frequency effects. Furthermore, the network demonstrates a strong tendency to regularize denominal verbs and deverbal nouns and masters the principles of voicing assimilation. Despite their incorporation into a single-system network, nouns and verbs exhibit some important differences in their profiles of acquisition. Most importantly, noun inflections are acquired earlier than verb inflections. The simulations generate several empirical predictions that can be used to evaluate further the suitability of this type of cognitive architecture in the domain of inflectional morphology. (shrink)

In the history of Chinese philosophy, Mozi calls music a “waste of resources,” considering it an aristocratic extravagance that does not benefit the everyday people. In its defense, Confucians highlight music’s moral and metaphysical qualities, arguing that music aids in moral cultivation and that music’s form mimics the structure of reality. The aim of this paper is to show that Korean philosophers provide yet another reason to think music is important. Music, and art in general, was used to express a (...) national identity at a time Korean philosophers were beginning to develop their own aesthetic consciousness in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A cultural movement called Joseonpoong (조선풍), “Joseon wind”, marked a shift away from Sinocentrism and towards Korea’s own unique value and practices. The new attempt to justify art’s value apart from its relationship to morality or metaphysics set Joseon thinkers apart from their Chinese predecessors. Using art for identity expression allowed the Koreans to reconceive art’s value while Sinocentric cosmological and cultural views were being challenged with the introduction of western knowledge. Art also became a tool for reversing hermeneutic injustice as new artistic practices and standards allowed the Koreans to meaningfully engage with previously neglected aspects of their lived lives. (shrink)

In this article we defend the view that, on the All Affected Principle of voting rights, the weight of a person’s vote on a decision should be determined by and only by the degree to which that dec...

In the Essay, Locke refers to the ordinary-sized natural things as ‘particular sorts of Substances’ (2.23), whereas the ‘three sorts of Substances’ (2.27) are more metaphysically laden sorts: God, finite spirits, and fundamental material particles. He posits the much-contested ‘substratum’ in each particular sort of substance but not any of the three sorts. It should also be noted that his list of the particular sorts includes ‘men’. In regard to this nobler sort, he refers to a further classification – viz., (...) ‘the Substance of spirit’ and ‘the Substance of the body’ – only in terms of their nominal essence. A naturalistic, nominalist approach is deeply entrenched in his account of the human-related sorts as well. In this chapter, I shall explore how Locke develops a theory of substance in the Essay that is less metaphysical, more naturalistic, and epistemically humbler than those of his rationalist contemporaries. (shrink)

In his profound discussion, Sterelny draws out common themes in the contributions to this topic: selective drivers in the coevolution of cognition and culture, the role of language in it, characteristics of cumulative cultural evolution, and issues of testability. He highlights the growing body of evidence for positive feedback mechanisms in cultural evolution, but also notes that progress is piecemeal, calling for more cross‐border work between cognitive science and research on cultural evolution.

This paper proposes a novel view in the historical injustice debate: Radical Reparations. Following a recent defense of reparations, Radical Reparations appeals to the Beneficiary Pays Principle to justify the assignment and distribution of reparative obligations for historical injustice among present-day agents. However, drawing on some considerations from the structural injustice literature, it argues that the relevant kind of benefits that demand redress are what I call structural benefits: the benefits of occupying powerful and privileged positions within contemporary social structures, (...) structures that are the legacies of major historical injustices like slavery and colonialism. Radical Reparations thus assigns present-day structural beneficiaries reparative obligations to support and enact various structural reforms to the social structures that produce unjust outcomes for historically marginalized groups today. This view avoids some of the problems with existing approaches to historical injustice in the philosophical literature and is better aligned with the reparations programs of recent social movements for racial and global justice. (shrink)

Structural injustice broadly refers to objectionable outcomes produced by generally accepted social structures for members of particular social groups. But theorists of structural injustice have said relatively little about why certain outcomes are objectionable, and many theorists suggestively connect structural injustice to a worry about oppression without explaining their precise normative concerns. I provide a normative analysis of structural injustice that addresses this gap and clarifies its connection to oppression. On this view, there are two kinds of structural injustice, each (...) grounded in a distinct moral concern. One is a freedom-based concern for how social structures harmfully constrain members of a social group, depriving them of the means to develop and exercise their capacities. The other is an equality-based concern for how social structures subordinate a social group to others in hierarchies of power, standing, and esteem. By disentangling these concerns, this account shows that our social structures contain multiple kinds of injustice that do not necessarily travel together; some social groups experience unfreedom without being subordinated to others, and indeed their unfreedom is intertwined with their dominant position over subordinated groups. Furthermore, against prevailing philosophical accounts, this analysis shows that there are good reasons to understand oppression primarily as an issue of inequality rather than an issue of unfreedom. (shrink)